Affinity Designer: The Comprehensive Guide for Beginners and Beyond

Hello designers and welcome to my comprehensive Affinity designer tutorial whether you're a complete beginner or just brushing up on your skills this video has everything you need to get started I'll guide you through the user interface each tool each feature and show you how to get the most out of affinity designer in a clear and easy to understand way now it is a very long video so use the chapters to skip around to the section that you want remember you can always come back with that being said time to grab a drink of your choice

sit back and let's get to it before we go ahead and open up Affinity designer the vector-based software I just want to show you the difference between a pixel based image like the one on the left and a vector based image like the one on the right so I'm going to go ahead and just show you so if I scale it up take note that it actually looks pretty good quality right now doesn't it if I click and scale it up you can see this quality is lost you can see it's very pixelated and Jagged

the edges that's because A pixel-based image is made of individual little squares that are called pixels and they're all different shades of color and they start to reveal themselves when you scale it up so if you were to design it this size yeah it looks fine to me as soon as you scale it up you lose quality let's switch to the vector based image on the right if I go ahead and scale this up you'll notice that it has lost no quality it's very very sharp Vector software like Affinity designer is ideal for creating crisp

scalable designs unlike pixel-based software where images get blurry when resized vector Graphics stay sharp at any size this makes it perfect for creating logos icons and illustrations that need to look good on everything from business cards to things as big as Billboards okay now we know that let's go ahead and open up Affinity designer so you've just opened Affinity designer and you're either presented with this screen or a new document setup window if you're like me and you don't see it simply head on up to file and new here's the new document window if you

want to see this every time you open affinity designer simply Click on this little check box down here show on Startup before we set up our new document I just want to run through everything here so you know and understand what it is so account is the first one It'll say who the app is licensed to just under there and on the right hand side it says my add-ons now add-ons are things like brush packs that you might have bought from the Affinity Store you can install and uninstall them from here as it's all from

the cloud if you want to browse the store just click on the blue button and it will go through to the Affinity Store moving over to the next section which is called New click on that in this section you'll be creating your new document whether it be for web or print and by the way if you already know all of this you can skip to the next section but basically on the left hand side you can scroll down here and think of all of these as presets maybe this would be better for print the end

product will be being printed on a piece of paper or something and then you've got photo or web so we can go ahead and choose them from here as well so I just click web there and I'll choose fhd 1080p on the right hand side these are all the Settings for that preset and remember you don't need to keep these sizes if you've got your own size in mind you just type it out there and it's done so you've got page width page height and you see it says PX that means pixels so you'll be

working in pixels if you create this document if you don't want pixels go over to document units click on that maybe you're working in inches feet yards up to you then you've got the dots per inch starts off at 72 there and you can drag it all the way up depending if you're going to print maybe you go a little bit higher to 300 okay then you've got create artboard I want to go into this a little bit more later on but you can click that and it will create your document with an artboard in

place already then you've got actual size Zoom I usually leave this on default but here are some of the options and then you've got this image placement option and you've got two options within it prefer links or prefer embedded if you're just starting out just keep it as prefer embedded now I don't want to go too much into this but basically it's you telling Affinity how to deal with images like let's say a photo that you place inside of Your Affinity document if you go for embedded the photo will be inside of the Affinity file

so the file size will be slightly bigger but it would be easier just to send to somebody the Affinity file and the photo will be inside of it if you go for prefer linked Affinity designer basically creates a link between the photo wherever it is on your computer and the Affinity file the file size will be a lot smaller but you just need to be mindful of how you handle and store your files make sure they're all in one place basically because if you delete or move one of those files from that folder it will

no longer be linked and you'll be prompted to go and find wherever that is if you want to know more about this or anything Affinity designer related simply head on up to the help section click on Affinity designer to help and then just go over to search and we'll just type in embed press return and you see here right at the top embedding versus linking go ahead and read that and see what's right for you but as we're starting out just keep it as embedded okay moving on to the color tab this is where you'll

choose which color format you'll use so RGB for more like Screens and cmk for print you decide which one you want and also you can use color profile srgb or all of these options here and you can also start your document off with a transparent background remember you can change all of this later on as well so doesn't matter if you make a mistake here going over to margins I don't want to include margins on this one because I'm not going to be creating anything like a magazine or anything like that then we've got bleed

you can add that and scale as well more for like architecture or people working at certain sizes so if you're happy with the preset as it is you can go ahead and press on create I'm going to show you how to to make this section work better for you because let's say print is right at the top maybe you don't design for print very often and maybe you want web at the top simply go to web down here there it is and just click and drag it right to the top now web is at the

top so every time you open it it's going to be there let's say you choose fhd 1080p you can mark this as a favorite with this little heart right here and then you can just go up to show favorites and you'll see there it is but I Never usually do that I create my own presets and I'm going to show you how to do that right now so head down to this little icon here I'll try and zoom in so you can see it this little icon here is new category click on that and it's

telling me to name it so I'm going to name it artist right presets now press return and right at the bottom there it is I don't want it to be at the bottom so click drag it up to the top and there it is Arch just right presets is up there so we need to add a preset now so what I like to do is just make my life easier I could just click on one of these resets that are already there so fhd 1080p okay let's go to layout and just check everything the way

we want it so I want an artboard in there so great I'll click on that color that's fine margins I don't want to include those and everything else is looking fine so I'm happy with that so I'll just go down here on the bottom left and I'll click on add new preset I'll click it and I have to name the actual preset so I'll just call this1 20 by 1080 that'll be pixels of course category will be artist right presets and you can choose a different icon click okay and now You see at the top

there we've got one preset in there and you can keep creating these so from this section you could just make a square so 1080 by 1080 pixels everything else is fine and I can go ahead and create another preset from that as well so go down here to the bottom left add new preset and I'll call this 1080 by 1080 and press okay so now I've got two that maybe I always work with these sizes this works for me now if you no longer want this preset you could just click and delete the whole category

or you can rightclick on each individual one rename them or delete them and the next option on the left hand side is called open if you click on that it'll open a window so you can search around on your computer for Affinity designer files that you're already working on so there's one that I've just placed there art in progress you can click open and it will open that document note that it says AF design that is the Affinity designer file type by the way I'm going to press cancel for now the next one underneath that

is recent I'm not going to click on it because it'll open up all my recent files but if you've been working on a lot of them they'll All be in there and just skipping past templates there's one called lessons if I click on that you can see you can download these six- minute lessons these tutorials if you're using Affinity designer for the first time and you've got a few other ones here I would also o suggest you go up to help and then go to Affinity designer to learning portal click on that and it will

go through to an affinity site where you can learn all about it and the last one on the list before we actually get into the nitty-gritty of affinity designer I could show you how it works the last one is templates now this isn't super beginner friendly this is after you've been designing for a while but I'm just going to cover it as that's everything covered in this section okay so templates how do they differ from the presets that we were looking at presets are more setting up your document the right way templates are where you

have Design Elements already in there so an example would be let's say every month you make a new employee of the month design you've got to change pictures and names you may as well create a template for that okay so that's what we're going to do so I'm in here and what do I do there are currently no templates please add folders containing your templates so here's how I would do it okay so I'm going to go to my desktop and I'm just going to show you a folder I created completely empty artist right templates

okay and then you got to go ahead and make your design employee of the month you can see it's an affinity designer file so what I'll do is I'll just double tap that to open it there it is very basic but imagine these are all pictures here so every month I'd change the pictures and then the names for the new people that are going to be employees of the month okay so it's already a file I just need to save it as a template so what I'm going to do is going to go up to

file and then I'm going to export as template so I'll click on that you see up here save as it says AF template that's the file type so I'm going to show Affinity where to save it so I'll click on desktop and there's the file artist WR templates that's the folder sorry that I'm going to place it in I'm going to press save okay that's done what do we do now well if I go up to file well in fact I'll just click off of that I'll just Press file new and then I'll go down

to template still nothing is there what do we do well we have to click on this here add template folder I'll click on that and then I'll click on desktop and there it is artist right templates I'll click on that and that's it I press choose now you can see my template is there so every time I open Affinity designer every single month let's say I just go down to templates I click on employee of the month and I press create now I'll go in change the names Sarah and then you can go export it

and that's how templates work okay I'm back to the new document setup screen it's better to get a good foundation at the start so you know what all of this is if you begin well maybe you end well who knows anyway let's begin by creating a new document so new let's go to web and just choose full HD 1080P and we're not going to create an artboard yet so don't check that and press create so we have our new document excellent if you look up here this is the document name it says Untitled because we

haven't saved it always save your file because if you started designing right now and maybe your laptop dies then you've lost Everything haven't you so let's go up to file and save as and I'll just click on desktop and we'll call it um Affinity begin yeah Affinity begin and I'll press save and now it says Affinity begin if you've never used a piece of design software before you'll probably be a little bit overwhelmed by all of these icons all of the different areas I'm wondering where you begin well first of all I just want to

tell you there's three different work areas if you will in Affinity designer and these are called personas so if you look in the top left hand corner you'll see that there's three icons up here designer Persona pixel Persona and Export Persona so it defaults to designer Persona and this is where you'll be spending the most of your time creating and editing your vector artwork so you'll be drawing shapes using the pen tool adding color Etc all vector-based artwork moving on to the next one which is pixel persona if I click on that you'll notice that

some of the tools change and the UI changes slightly the user interface this is where you'll be working with pixel-based images like raster images think of um things like photos when you zoom in really far it Starts getting pixelated their pixel-based images and here you'll be adding texture and painting in using like paint brushes and things like that just fine-tuning your design I guess and you'll be able to erase and smudge just like you would in in like Photoshop or something like that and the final Persona is called export Persona if I click on that

you'll see the UI changes again different work area so once you finished your design and you're happy with it you want to export that to a file to share with somebody whether it's a JPEG or a PNG or a PDF all of those so this is a more advanced way of exporting there is a slightly simpler way but once you get used to the program you can use this option now I don't want to overwhelm you but down here you see it says slices and Affinity begin that's our file that we created see there it

says PNG I can export one whole design as a PNG and at the same time I can export it as a JPEG and I can just keep adding different kind of file types down here so I've got three different formats here I can export a slice basically that's uh whichever part of the design you decide to export I can just press that And it will export all of these at the same time but we're not going to get into that right now because this is just for beginners okay so let's go back to designer Persona

and have a look at the user interface so remember I said when you set up your document don't worry if you make a mistake and you want to change the dimensions of it so this is like our canvas right now this uh big rectangle don't worry you can change it so see just up here it says document setup click on that and you can change all of the dimensions Etc to whatever you actually wanted to create let's break down the user interface into more easily understandable bite-sized chunks so we know what the purpose of each

area is okay so directly in front of me we have the rectangle we made that's our canvas remember it's 1920 x 1080 pixels think of this as a piece of paper in front of you on a desk on the left hand side we have the tools panel and in here it contains all the tools you'll be using to create your new designs think of this as a pencil case you open it up and you have a pen a pencil a paintbrush and some shapes if I go ahead and select the pencil tool for instance I'll

Click on that you'll notice that a new toolbar appears right at the top there this is called the context toolbar and basically this toolbar allows us to change how the pencil tool performs so in its default State there is no stabilizer on okay so if I just click and I just drag here drag a little line you can see it's a bit Jagged it's not very smooth but if I go up the context toolbar if I just click on stabilizer if I select that one and I do the same again click and drag you can

see it's a lot smoother now so the context tool bar allowed me to change how the pencil tool performed and on each tool that you press you'll get different options okay now I'll just click on the Move tool up here this is the one you'll be using all the time by the way all of them have shortcuts but this is just the basics of the UI right now so we'll be getting into it a little bit further on so this strip right at the top this one here this is this is called the toolbar and

basically in here it'll allow you to perform quick actions you can see there's transform Boolean operations I'll just click one of them so you see so if I select the top squiggly line that we made If I go up to transform and click on this one it says flip horizontal it allows us to flip it so up here are quick actions that you can perform on designs that you've created moving on to the right hand section here this one is called the studio panel and basically it's a bunch of different panels that allow you to

do different things with the design that you've created so if we look up here the first panel here is called color and then you've got swatches and then stroke and appearance and by the way you can change the order of all of these but right now color okay so color of course will allow you to change what you've just drawn out so if I wanted to change the color of this line here this is called a stroke by the way I could just click on this and change the color okay but I'll just press command

Zed to go back for now by the way you'll be using that a lot if you're just beginning that is going back one step if you've made a mistake but going back to the studio panel just underneath you can see here layers and then brushes quick effects Etc this is what you'll be using a lot in your design so each time that you draw something out whether It's a shape or a squiggly line or something it will create a new layer so you can see I've got two lines and I've got two layers here and

just underneath there as well you have a bunch more options we'll be going into all of this but one of them is layer effects where you can start applying different effects to the design that you've just made I'll just click off of that so that's the basics of the user interface by the way the user interface is customizable you don't have to have let's say color up here you don't have to have color there you can move it over there if it's not that important for you you can also drag it out onto your canvas

and you can play around with this you can have the layers out as well let's say if you have two screens this might be quite useful or let's say you just want to play around with a C right next to your design great but if you're beginning and like me in the early stages I would play around with these and then I wouldn't know how to get them back to where they were or the order of things would change and I just wish it would be like when I first opened Affinity well you can reset

it by heading up to window Studio and then reset Studio click on that and everything is where it should be and as you've probably noticed the user interface is in dark mode but you don't have to keep it like that so it's best to set it up the way you like to work from the beginning so we change that by going up clicking on settings here and then you'll scroll down to user interface and select that and then you can go over to UI style you see right now it's on dark I can click light

and maybe this is easier on your eye or you can work better in this mode and then you can just go ahead and press close but I will keep mine on dark for now now that you have a good understanding of the user interface let's briefly touch upon on the toolbar up here as you can see I have descriptions underneath each of the icons and this is particularly helpful if you're a beginner and you don't know what each of the icons mean so I'm going to show you how to customize this section so it looks

exactly like mine and that will be helpful when watching the tutorial so let's head on up to the top press view head down to customize toolbar this popup box appears and this allows me to drag in and Out different items to customize it way I want so I literally just drag and let go and if I don't want something in there I can just drag that out but the important thing here is right down the bottom it says show it says icon and text or icon only if I clicked icon only you wouldn't see any

description and it might be a little bit more difficult for you to understand so let's keep it on icon and text and when you're finished just press done also the tools on the left hand side here you can also customize them and to make this tutorial easier for you it's better to have all the icons I have here it should be the default but one of my subscribers did ask where is the knife tool because it wasn't showing for them so how we do that again we go up to view and we go down to

customize tools click on that and you see here are all the tools that you can drag and drop to the left hand side so for instance I can drag transparency tool I can click and drag that down and you see it creates a space for them and then you let go as you can see I just have one column down the side if you would prefer to have two you can just click down here and choose whichever Number you want I'm going to keep it on one and press close and finally you can see that

I have a ruler on the left and the top so how you get that to show is you go to view and then it says here show rulers and then you can just click on that see if I press it they disappear and if I go down show rulers there they are okay briefly I'm just going to show you how I'm navigating around this document this canvas I'm using a laptop and a trackpad so with two fingers on the trackpad and if I do the pinching in movement I'm zooming out much like other programs and

then you do the opposite with two fingers and you're zooming in two fingers on the trackpad you can move around like this so you can go left right up down Etc also you can use some shortcuts I'll just quickly show you that before I do them so if you go up to view you see it says Zoom here these are all the shortcuts on the right right hand side here so you can zoom in with the command plus or command minus for the zoom out and then an important one here would be Zoom to fit

so command and zero and then your document will go to the right side so it fits the screen so if I just zoom out here So command minus you see I'm zooming out look at the shortcuts on the left hand side zoom in and I I'll try that command zero so command zero the canvas is uh zoomed to fit okay it's time to get started so on the left hand side important note here when you're beginning you'll just be clicking on the pen when you want that you'll be clicking on the pencil when you want

that but I just want you to note that when you hover over one of them there's a little p next to it that is your keyboard shortcut so as you get more familiar with them you won't want to go ahead and click on that so I'm in the pencil tool now if I just click p on the keyboard now I'm in the pen tool and V for the move tool much quicker isn't it so I don't want anybody to get overwhelmed when they start these design programs because there's a lot to see I just want

you to think of it in basic terms okay here's a piece of paper in front of me and what are the tools I'm going to be using to create it's just like your pencil case a pen can make a mark on a piece of paper a pencil can too a paintbrush can and these shapes can as you drag them on and also the text tool can majority of all Of these icons that you see everywhere are just going to help you manipulate those shapes you've initially made so with that being said let's get on it

getting started okay let's start off with drawing out a basic shape so on the left hand side I'm going to choose rectangle tool I'm going to click on that and I'm just going to click and drag out like that and as you can see the default color is this light gray but for this purpose of this tutorial I'm going to go over to the color Tab and I'm going to choose orange I will be going more into the color tab in detail later on but this is just for the purpose of the tutorial so I'm

going to press delete on that so we can start from aesh so the first time you click and drag out what you'll notice is there's a little box with the dimension in there and you see it says PX that means pixels cuz we're working in a pixel document because we set it like that the other thing you'll notice is that I can't exactly draw a perfect square very easily here and also that it's a rectangle that's about it so this is kind of drawing freehand okay I'm going to let go and now you can see

in the layers tab we have a new Layer and it says rectangle because we're using the rectangle tool okay I'm going to delete that so another way is and watch where my cursor is if I click and drag out like we did before but this time I hold down command on the keyboard you see it's scaling from the center so no matter which way I go it will stay centered okay and then we can just let go and our shape is created I'll delete that again as you can see here the next option is equal

Dimensions so if I wanted to draw out a perfect square by the way this is works for any shape a perfect whatever shape you're using circle triangle I just click drag out like we did before but if I hold down the shift key it will keep it in perfect Dimensions so you see there both width and height are exactly the same I'll delete that also we can combine these shortcuts so if we start off I'll just draw it in the middle there because it makes sense I'll click and drag I'll hold down command and I

will also hold down shift and now I can drag from the center outwards and that is the basics of drawing out your first shape there is this one other option I will show you but I never use it and I don't know Many that do but here it is click and drag out but now just hold control on the keyboard and you can see that it's kind of anchored up here on that left Edge and the reason is cu we started dragging from the left to right so if I just click and drag here from

this side and I hold down control you see it's working in kind of the opposite fashion I never usually use this I usually just drag out a square like this and then I start playing around with rotation Etc and that's what we're moving on to next now that you've drawn your square or rectangle what can you do now well note that we're still in the rectangle tool so if we head on up to the move tool shortcut is V click on that basically we can click and drag it around our canvas to wherever we want

also note that it has a blue outline around it and there some strange white dots there what are they basically they tell us we can do things we can manipulate it further so if I just hover over this one it says I can go up and down so I go up and down also works from the side left and right also from the corner I can scale it down from that corner to the bottom left there and remember we can include those shortcuts So if I want to scale it down perfectly I can hold down

shift and click and drag down and it won't change its shape what else can we do well we can head to this section here and we can skew it so if I click and drag I can go left and right and it shows the degrees of skew I'm going to call it and you can do that from obviously this little node here up and down there we go okay I'll just press command said so it goes back to a perfect square again let's talk about rotation okay so you can grab this handle here and rotate

it from the center and you can see the degrees of rotation what if I wanted to get a perfect 90° rotation well I could just hold down shift click and you see it moves in 15° increments and there we go I'm at 90° I can let go and that's done so let's rotate it up a little bit so I can show you how we can include transform so I'm just going to squeeze this down here and by the way if you wanted to squeeze it not just from one side if you just hold down command

it squeezes and expands from the center so if I just leave it where it is let's head up to the transform panel there it says flip horizontal remember this section here Remember me talking about the toolbar basically allows you to do quick actions that you might do quite often flip horizontal I'll click it once it's done it if I click flip vertical you can see it's done it probably be better with a different shape but it is doing what it's supposed to and let me just change it so this one makes more sense rotate anticlockwise

if I click on that it's done it and if I click rotate clockwise it's done it so there are some of the actions that you can use also I'll just briefly touch on this okay if you wanted to copy this shape and you don't want to try and draw out the perfect one again you can press command C to copy command V to paste and you can see in the layers panel we now have two copies so I can just drag that out oh no but look it hasn't dragged out in a perfect alignment so

how do I do that well I'm just going to press command Zed and we have our two copies I'm just going to hold down shift click and I'm going to drag and you see that little line that's helping me to just drag it out in a perfect horizontal fashion and I let go and I'm happy with that so that's one way of doing it let me just delete that A quick way as well would be to just hold down command click and drag and you have your copy but again it's down here it didn't go

perfectly horizontal so I'll press command Zed to go back and what we're going to do is hold down command shift click and drag now it's a perfect copy and moved horizontally perfectly as well so they are aligned at the bottom but I'm going to be going more into duplication processes later on cuz there's some very interesting ways of doing it but let's go back a step so we have our perfect square again okay now I want to briefly talk about the transform panel I'm not talking about the transform that we've just used to flip it

left and right up and down I'm talking about the one that's down the bottom right here that looks a little bit technical now maybe you shouldn't play around with this too much when First beginning design but I'll just briefly touch on it so you can see here it says W and H that's width and height and remember when I click on this and I sort of try and change the dimensions of it you can see W and H and it's giving me the readout there if I go down I can see that that is the

the read out of that shape Cuz it's selected so I can go ahead and just change these so I just type in 500 press return type in 500 in height press return and now I know that that is perfectly 500 pixels on each side so what else can we do down here well remember when I rotated the square you see this little r gives me the degrees basically if I look down there on R it gives me the degrees so I could just make it zero press return and it will go back to being the

way was before so that's your rotation and then this one s remember when I pressed skew before when I was doing that it said s that is also giving me the skew I'm going to call it I can press zero on that and make it go back to the way it was before what else can you do well basically the X and Y AIS I wouldn't suggest playing around with this at all but basically this tells you where it is on the page so X being the horizontal axis from sort of left to right and

Y being the vertical axis so let's just say I wanted this Square to touch that left hand side uh I would just go here to X and press zero cuz that's the start of the document and it will go there so these are the kind of things that you can do and lastly I'll just touch On this let's imagine we wanted to rotate it I'll just rotate it let's say 45° and I'll press return why has it rotated from a corner well I'll just press command Z to go back you see this little design here

basically this is telling it where I should rotate from or where I should expand from so if I just click the center see that's selected now and now I put in 45° press return it rotates it from the center so I chose the center anchor point I'll press command Z to go back that's the basics of the transform panel let's move on okay this is where things get slightly more interesting let's delve more into shapes because they're kind of smart so we know we've dragged out a square here uh in fact let me just change

the color of that cuz I'm getting bored of that one and now let's drag out a circle and the reason I'm doing this by the way is to show you that you can use the context Toolbar to manipulate the initial shape so I'll just go down and long press on this one here and we get more options I'm going to click on Star tool and I'm going to click and drag out a star I'm going to hold shift so it stays in the correct Dimensions both sides what else will I choose um maybe the Cog

tool and one more let's go for let's go for the P tool because I want to show you something about that okay going back to the move tool I'm on the move tool now I'm going to zoom in so that we can have a look so I'm just pinching with the trackpad inwards like that okay so I've selected my square up here in the context toolbar there is an option that says corner and if we click on that we can click on rounded and you see what it does it rounds off those pointy edges and

it also says 25% there radius so if I click on that I drag up all the way up it turns into an actual full-on Circle just like the one on the right right and I can click all the way back and it will go back to how it was before with the pointy edges so this context toolbar has allowed us to manipulate these shapes cuz they're kind of smart another thing I wanted to mention if you don't like dragging these sliders around like this and you want a more visual edit you can go ahead and

click on the Node tool so you see this tool over here the shortcut is a if I click on this you'll see now we have these little red dots on the corners and basically these are the locations That we can edit because they're kind of smart shape right so up here it says 24% if I click and drag this you'll see the percentage change so I can just make my edits directly on this Square okay I'll just leave that there for now and let's move on to the next one a circle what could you possibly

do with a circle well the context tool bar is telling me I can turn it into a donut in one click or a pie so let's click donut once I've clicked that I have many more options whole radius let's play around with that start angle and you know what I don't know what the start angle is so I will just go down and play around with the nodes CU I'm in the node tool right so I could just click on it like this and let me click around with this one oh okay so that is

the start angle I do actually know but you know what I mean so I'm just kind of moving this around and it's giving me kind of these snapping points like that's 90° and so I prefer to edit visually so I'll play around with these and now let me just press close pi and it will make it go back to before I will just press command Zed to go back okay so command Z command Z all the way until it goes back To being a circle again now I want to convert it to a pi so

I'm going to click on that and now we get our options CU I'm still in the node tool I can click on one of these and change the pi good for making Pi charts or Pac-Man maybe so that's what that's allowed us to do and if I just zoom out real quick remember over here I added a pi these are all just kind of presets some of them can turn into other shapes as well like the square turn into a circle Etc so you choose the one that's right for you I like these ones okay

because you can add more points to it so right now I can see this one I can make it slightly fatter and this one I can make those edges in the corner there quite round and I can also click on this one and it kind of pulls it out you see that guide pulls it out so it's almost like a flower but what I can also do with this is I can go up to points and I can just drag this up to however many points I want so there's 20 points there and then I

can start making my edits so really cool and you can also have Inner Circle look that's the inside Little Dot there so very cool I'm not going to go through all of these but here we go There's a cog you can play around with all of the red dots and make it as you wish and obviously I'm not going to play it around with this because you've just seen me turn a circle into that so there are the shapes and there's plenty of options there there's even a QR code tool so play around with that

and get creative in this section I want to talk about further customizing a on the shapes that you've drawn so if I just go ahead and drag out another square that boring square again there was one section of the context toolbar that I didn't touch but it's quite important okay so right now if you look in the layers panel it says rectangle so we know the shape is a rectangle CU we use the rectangle tool okay same for any of the other ones it will say ellipse if you draw out an ellipse so we can't

do much more than what I've shown you we can do squashing it and scaling it and everything like that but what we can do now is click on converts to Curves and that's in the context toolbar so I'll click on that and now if you notice in the layers panel it no longer says rectangle it says curve and also notice that my tool has changed you see that it's the node tool Again so up there we'll just double check yes it is selected so Affinity knows that we want to play around with the nodes that's

these squares on each side because we clicked on convert to Curves so I can click on one of these and drag it and now I'm customizing that shape further you can also add more nodes so if I just hover over this line here I can click on that and drag it in or out and I'll be going into this in more detail later on but you can see that you can drag these outlines to create something completely unique so it's called a curve and just in case you ever see this written down anywhere there is

open curves and closed curves this would be a closed curve because if you see the nodes they're connected on each side by this line so the shape is complete whereas let's say you just get a pen and you draw it on a piece of paper just out like this I'll just do it quickly we'll be getting more into this another time if I just draw this and just so you can see the outline so this would be considered an open curve this one here I made it with a pen tool I want to show you

more about all of this later but just so you know there's closed curves and there's open curves This shape isn't complete CU it's not connecting to itself okay let's move on in this section I want to teach you all about color applying color to your Des design we'll start off with what the difference is between fill and stroke so right now I have two stars in front of me they're both gray so that gray color is called the fill in Affinity designer and we'll go on to stroke afterwards but how do we change this fill

color there's two locations one is up here you see it on the top left it says fill you can change it from there and the second place is in the color tab on the right hand side you see this circle here if I just hover over it for a little bit it will eventually pop up see it says set fill so we can change it from both locations but I will change it from the top left okay so I'm going to click on that and now we're presented with this color wheel now if you don't

like color wheels you can change it to any of these options but I'm going to stick to this for now okay so we'll choose our color I will make it some kind of yellow color so from the outside you choose the color and then inside you can further customize how dark you want it or Etc So we're just going to keep it quite saturated for now so that's our our fill okay now what is stroke stroke is basically an outline so if I head on up to stroke which is right next to fill and I

click on that and I'll just choose a color maybe I'll just go black okay so it's black now but you can't really see it can you it's very thin if it is there so how we change the width of this outline this stroke is simply right next to it you see where it says one pixel that means it's one pixel width right now so if I click on this and I slide it to the right you can see it gets thicker so basically left is fill right is stroke and if we look up in the

color tab this circle here is fil and if I click on the dut shape that is our stroke and there you can make your changes okay also if you do not want a fill or a stroke you can simply go up to the color tab here I don't want any fill on this I can click on it and then I press set fill to none and you see it has a little shortcut there when you get more used to the program you can start using that shortcut instead so I'll just click on that and now

we have no fill and to prove that I will just drag it over this star You can see straight through it okay now I want to cover the different types of fill options so we have a yellow star here we know we can choose just plain colors don't we so we hit fill and we choose from the color wheel great underneath that there's an option called opacity and if I click and drag that down I can see behind The Star and through to that rectangle in the background okay that's great also on opacity this one's

kind of hidden it says switch to noise on that little circle there so if I click on that and I drag this up you can see I can start applying noise to the color I chose okay so what else is there well there's this Color Picker tool and this one is extremely useful so imagine you're making a design and you've seen a color that you really love on a website or maybe it's on a photo that you own that's on your desktop or maybe it's within Affinity designer this is how it works Works basically you

can click and keep your finger held down and then you can go ahead and Sample any color so I could sample from this blue you see the values change as I hover over them or I could drag it off Affinity onto a website or something so for Now though I will just sample this blue color and I will let go what has changed not a lot except this little circle next to the color pick a tool is blue so if I click it I can apply it to the star very handy so let me just

get rid of this rectangle angle in the background and we'll look at the other options so we have swatches on the left hand side there if I click on that basically these are color palettes that are pre-made so there's colors this is the one that comes with affinity but also if you click on it you can see a bunch of panone colors if you're very particular and there's lots of options there you can create your own color palette as well but you can see look I've made one there there's one from Franken tune if you've

seen him before he sells things on Affinity shop but anyway if you're beginning just keep it on colors and if you want you can switch over to this and uh take one of these colors and apply them like that okay so we've covered color as well and now gradient this option can produce some really cool results so how it works is this I've clicked on gradient I can see there's this line where it goes from white to Blue but how Do I actually apply it well you apply it with the gradient tool so if you

look down here on the left hand side there says gradient tool the shortcut is G so I'm going to click on that still nothing okay so if if I click from the top and down and if you want to keep it straight you just hold down shift and I'll leave it about there now if we go back up to that rectangle I'll click on that you can see it's slightly lighter on that side slightly darker on that side so on the left one I'll just select it and I'll go down to color our color wheel

is there again I'll choose I'll choose that kind of color there and if I go to the second little color Point click on that go back to color and choose a different color that's a bit dark so I'll bring that up a little bit this is what you'd call a linear gradient cuz it's going from one color to another in a straight line you can change the type here elliptical radial conical play around with those as much as you want and by the way you can select these color points from either on the actual star

see I can select that one or this one or I can just go up here and select them from here um you can add extra points is what I wanted To say in the middle so let's add one here so if I double tap you'll see one has appeared down here I can move this around so it changes I can change the color of this so it looks a lot different so we can see what is the difference also there's these little handles either side so not only can I move this color Point around you

can add as many as you want you can also play around with these handles to squeeze in the color a little bit more here so that's the basics of it you can also select one side and make it completely transparent so down here I've selected the yellow one I'll just grab this opacity slider drag it down and then this will be more transparent as you can see by the checker board right there and then you could just reverse gradient as well and there's all those kind of options and you can see right next to this

little rectangle here you can do similar things from there they just give you lots of options to make your changes rotate gradient reverse gradient Etc and I'll just add that if you ever click off of your shape and start editing something else and you want to go back to your shape and play around with the gradient then Just select it go over to the gradient tool or press G the gradient line will appear and then you can start playing with it and just whilst I'm here I will show you elliptical so I've just clicked on

elliptical and you see you can just drag this out and let me just get a little bit further in and you can drag it in like this and also you can squash it and whilst hovering over one of the color points I can hold down control on the keyboard click and squeeze it in like that moving on okay in this section I want to talk all about the stroke that's the black outline that you can apply to any of your designs so how do we start off I'm going to start from fresh so we have

a blue filed star with no stroke so what I'm going to do now cuz remember we can play around with the UI and drag it out so I'm just going to drag the color over there and I'm going to drag the stroke over here so that we can see exactly the changes I'm making right next to the shape so on the color tab you see here the fill I don't want to fill so I'm going to fill it to none then I'll click on the stroke here and I will just ensure it's black by just

going up like that okay great the color Is fine now let's move over to the stroke tab so with the stroke tab I want to increase the width like we did before so I'll just increase the width like that okay great so what are these other options here underneath well cap if I click on it now you won't really see a difference and that's because this more applies to open curves as this shape is a closed curve so let's go ahead and just grab the pen tool I'll just click on that now we'll just click

once here and click once here and then we have an open curve and we're going to play around with the cap on this so take note the ends are rounded from here as you can see and the next one will be butt cap so if I click on that you see it's I'll zoom in a little bit actually you can see the stroke stops about here and it's flat if we go to the last one which is square cap it's still flat but it just goes a little bit further above so there are the Caps

that you can see on an open curve now let's go back to this closed curve shape so I'm just going to click on the Move tool and select my star again so the next one is join so let's have a look at that the first one that is already selected is called round and you can see The star is not very pointy the next one is bevel joint I will select that and you can see that it's flattened off the edge there that's what it says and that's what it's done the next one is pointy

so miter join this is called so if I click on that it should technically be pointy and it will happen in most scenarios sometimes if you have a shape that's a little bit thin and pointy like this you have to up the miter CU remember this is a miter join so right now it's a 1.5 what if I just put it to seven there we go now we have a pointy Edge or a pointy corner I should say so what are the next options it says a line so right now you can see the actual

shape of our star that's the Blue Line there and it's in the center like it shows in the image there if we go aine stroke to the inside click on that now you can see inside of that blue line that is where the stroke is now housed and obviously this one is a line stroke to the outside so I click on that and there we go so you've got many different options here I'll just select the first one that we had now order so this one says draw stroke behind so if I click on that

nothing has happened okay and that's because We didn't have a fill so I'm just going to go back to our our color tab here if I select the fill and I give it that blue and I go back see the order draw stroke behind Okay and now if I draw stroke in front it will show the full stroke so you see this section here that's like half and that's half if i c click on this you'll see that that stroke is technically behind and then you can start playing around with whether it's aligned on the

inside or the outside so many different options let's move on from that so I'm going to get rid of that fill because I no longer want that now it says start and end and again this is better for an open curve like this one for instance so start I will just click on it and look it's giv me loads of options of arrow heads and circles Etc so I can choose triangle for one that's the start of it and then for the end maybe I could have this Square here so basically that's what that does

so you see right now that's the node if you want it to be right at the end then you would press that one there then you got some more options here swap Arrowhead with tail the usual stuff that just makes your life a little bit easier and that's Just basically to clear this option here I pressed it a bit fast there that one clears the arroe head so it's back to how it was before now getting a little bit more technical I won't play around with this too much but basically there's pressure I will show

you more of this later when we hit hit the pen and no tool but basically this is a pressure profile let me just get rid of that one in the middle there it's a pressure profile so if I just select one end and I drag it down it makes one Thin and the other thick and you could do the same for the other side as well or you can add a little node in the middle and drag it in like that but for now let's just move on from that now I want to draw your

attention to this check boox here it's very important scale with object so let's go ahead and scale it without that selected so I'm going to scale down like this and what are you noticing well the stroke Remains the Same Size but it's not scaling with the actual star here so if we go ahead and check it scale with object and now we'll try and rescale again you can see as the star scales down so does the stroke you'll also notice that we have this other option up here Dash line style so if I click on

that it's going to allow us to have a dash line style in fact I will apply that to our star so again I've clicked it I'll click dash line style and we've got a dash here you can play around with the spacing by playing around with these numbers down here so if I put five there and maybe six there basically the first one will be kind of the width of your first Dash and then the gap between it so you can make them equal and you can keep playing around with these numbers to however you

like it and in fact I can make the width a little bit smaller so it's more obvious what it's doing and make maybe close these down a little bit there we go so there we go there's a dash line style and there is one last thing I'll show you on this here it says balanced Dash pattern and basically that refers to each kind of point so if you look at the ends of the star there's always a dash there and that looks uh very uniform doesn't it if I click off of that it might not

be so uniform and the final option which I will kind of skim is basically texture line style because now we're getting more into the vector brush so if I click on that well it Still looks like a black stroke doesn't it but if we head on over to brushes down here and then we choose one of the brushes let's go for chalk and pastels I can click on that and apply that to our star but we'll cover more of that when we get to the vector brush tool but basically they are the stroke options moving

on okay in this section I'm going to cover the appearance Tab and what that does might be a little bit too complex right now so you can always skip past this one and come back to it later but because it's part of the studio and colors and strokes I will cover it now so you select your shape I've got my new trapezoid shape here and we'll go up instead of hitting stroke or color we'll go straight to the appearance panel and basically in this panel it'll allow you to add multiple Strokes or multiple fills so

let's do the multiple Strokes so I just click on the outline here our stroke click on that and it will bring up the color wheel let's just make it black there there it is and we changed the width by simply clicking on this and dragging that down Okay so we've got one stroke let's add another stroke so down here I click add Stroke okay so from here I'll do the same again except this time I choose a different color and now I'll change the width slightly so you can see everything's quite small right now so

I'm just going to quickly go to the black one make bring the width up a lot now I'm going to go to the pink one I'll bring that width up and you can see that we have two strokes here on one shape and you can change the order of this and show whether you want to align it in the center on the inside or on the outside and you can change the order by literally dragging these up and down but let's move on to the next section in this section we'll be covering color swatches color

swatches are very useful because it allows you to maintain consistency across your designs by easily just reusing specific colors okay let's go and select the swatches panel it's right next to the color panel so select it and if you don't see it there you can go ahead and go to window scroll down and you'll see swatches there select that and it will pop up in your studio somewhere so now that it's open we want to create our own Swatch pallet so we'll head on over to the Burger menu and we'll Click on that we have

a bunch of options here but what we want to do here is create an application palette and basically that means that this Swatch palette will be available across Affinity designer doesn't matter which document you're using of course you have some different options here but we'll just concentrate on that so I'm going to go ahead and click on it and now we have to name it I'll call it Swatch tutorial and I'll press okay and now you can see we have our own Swatch category Swatch tutorial so let's go ahead and add our first color so

I've created these squares here and I've chosen the color from the color Tab and these are the colors that I want to work with in my next design so with the first one selected I'm going to head on over to the swatches panel and there's this little icon here it says add current fill to pallet if I select that you can see we now have that color there so if I head on over to one of these gray squares down here I've got that selected I can apply this color by simply going up to my

swatches panel and selecting the color I want and of course you could do this with all of these including gradients so for this one I made a Gradient and I want to add it as a Swatch so same again I can go ahead and click on this button but also I want to note that you can just right click and scroll down to the bottom and you see here we have add two swatches so I can go ahead and click this one here from fill if my shape had a stroke on it an outline I

could sample that color of the outline there or I could sample both and it would add the outline color and the fill color of the shape but for now I'll just click on from fill and you can see here we have two colors one of them is a gradient and one of them is not and right now I can't really tell when I hover over them so I can right click and I can go ahead and rename the fill here or I can delete it make a copy or I can edit it so let's go

ahead and add this gradient to this other gray Square I've selected it and now I'll go up to my gradient and click it and we have a gradient applied okay that's the basics of the swatches panel but for now I just want to delete one of them cuz I want to show you an extra feature so I'll right click on this one and I will delete it and now we're only left with that green color so with the green color over here I can right click on it and you see down here we have some

more options create color cord now I'm not going to go through all of them but what I will click on is Shades so if I select this one it will automatically give me shades of this color making it really quick for me to just get the same color all in different shades so I could save this as a swap palette and just call it something else maybe green Shades and if you're very happy with the swatches palette that you created and you want to make sure you save it in case maybe you have to delete

Affinity designer and reinstall it you can go ahead and click on the burger menu again and then scroll down to export palette and that's the basics of swatches this section is all about understanding the layers panel and it will soon become apparent to you as you start designing with Vector objects that you accumulate a lot of layers so let's see how it works so I'm going to design a really simple party person so I'm going to start off with the rounded rectangle I'm going to click and drag that out like this there we go just

drag that down a little bit more and I need a head so I'm going to click on the ellipse tool I'm going To click here hold down command and shift so it starts drawing out from the center okay there's the head and now we need a party hat of course so I'm going to click on this and go to Triangle tool I'm going to draw a little triangle hat there okay now I'm going to switch to the move tool so I'm going to go ahead and click on that shortcut is V I'm going to click

on the party hat and just place it slightly sideways like that in fact I think I'll make everything smaller so how do I do that I'll just click and drag over all of the objects and they're all selected now as you can see in the layers panel and I can just size it down so I can drag from the corner and oh look I don't want it to uh squash so I just hold down shift and I can drag it like that I can also hold down command and just drag down from the center so

somewhere like that looks good I'm just zoom in a little bit okay so I can drag that hat up a little bit we need some color now to make sense of all of this so the party hat I don't want any stroke on that so I'll get rid of that I'll go to the color make it purple great for the guy I'll just choose some kind of orangey color there we go I've Got the color for the head and I'll just choose I don't know blue again for the body so very simple but this is

all about the layers panel okay so if we go over to the layers panel here we can see that the hat is on the top and basically any layer that is on the top will be seen first and you can see it's lying over the head which is slightly behind and that is behind the Hat there so that's the second in line and then third in line is the body you see you can't see through to it but let's say with the body I could move it above the head and now it will be covering

the head so I'll just press command Z to go back for a second when you're working with lots of layers it's really important to know what they all are because some can look very similar so I suggest you go through each one and name them so we've got triangle here it says I want to call this hat so I'm just going to double tap here I'm going to type in hat and this one I'll put head and I'll double tap on the last one and call that body so now I know what they all are

at a glance so like I was showing you you can click on these layers here so you can click and drag them up and you can see as you Drag them up you can see this little blue line you could just let go and you can see what it's like or you could drag it all the way to the top you wouldn't see a difference there anyway you can do it like that or you can also use the quick actions so remember at the top here we have a range so if I click on this

one I just press forward one click on that and it's gone forward one in layers panel if I go back here I wonder if I could send it back yes I I can back one I click that so these can be very useful for you like the last one here move to front if it's all the way at the back so you can use these quick options to arrange your layer stack and when you get really used to using layers you can use shortcuts so with the body selected I can simply press command and right

bracket key see in the bottom left hand corner you can see command and left bracket key to send it back I'll do it a few times so you can see Command right bracket key forward command left bracket key to send it back so you can press that as many times as you want to go up to the top and back so this can be really useful when you've just selected it from here and you don't want to go all the way to The layers panel you could just start playing with that shortcut and also let's

say I wanted to move this whole thing over to the left hand side yes I can go ahead and select it all like that and move it across but if I'm going to be moving a lot of things around and there's lots of other shapes around that I don't want to select I can always do this I can select them all from here or I can go into the layers panel you see here I select the first one and if I hold down shift on the keyboard and click the last one it will select all

of them and then I could move them around if I just wanted to select let's say the hat and then the body I select the hat first that's highlighted I press command and I click on the body now just those two are selected and I can just move them around but when the layers start getting out of control you'll start thinking about how to group them so if I wanted to group all of these together I could simply select the first one hold shift select the last one and then I could just right click and

you see we've got a few options here I can just press group but remember there's a shortcut so you could press command G but I'll just press this for now And you can see now that this is in a group it's called group you could name that party person if you wanted in fact I will so party person and then we've got a little arrow here so I can click on that arrow and see what's within the group and obviously this group I can just go ahead and select it and move it around anywhere I

want and remember we can duplicate it as well so I could just hold down command click and drag and now it's a it's a real party now okay let me press command Z to go back a few steps so also you might want to ungroup it if you don't want that grouped anymore how do you do that well you just right click on it again and press ungroup so let's use the shortcut sh we I'll select all of them and I'm just going to press command and G you see it's in a group already I

no longer want it in a group okay shift command G now they're not in a group anymore that simple also sometimes you might want to lock a layer CU you don't want it to move maybe you're playing around with another portion of the design you can do that so right now I'll select the body and over on the layers panel you see if I just har over to this section here I can press lock And now that way let's say if I just want to select those two even if I select all of this it

it will only select the hat and the head not the body cuz that's locked I can't even move it so the way to unlock it would be just to click on the padlock icon again toggle lock and now I can move it around again also sometimes you might want to hide a layer and basically this is very easy as well you select the head go over here and it says toggle visibility I can click on that and now it's hidden it's still there so if you ever want it back you could just look here go

through your layers panel and you you can see the white circles means it's visible and the darker one there means it's not so you just click that again and now it's visible you'll also notice in the layers panel there's something called opacity there so if I just select the head and go over to opacity I can drag that down and it's much like the fill opacity right up here so there's just plenty of ways to play around with opacity okay and the other thing is you see here it says normal these are all blend modes

as I cycle through you can't really see what's going on right now so what I'm going to Do is I'm just going to move these two out of the way I'm going to duplicate this remember how we did it before I just hold command click and drag out a little bit and I want to make a couple of duplicates and change the color so they're all slightly different and then I'm going to play with the blend modes so with the green one selected I'm going to go over to normal that is our blend modes and

you see darken you can start seeing through it reacts differently to I guess the different colors how light or dark each color is underneath and you see you can play around with these and get a style that you want okay moving on whilst we're on the subject of layers I want to show you clipping and masking and specifically the differences between them I use this all the time and many designers too as well so we know how to group items but we don't yet know how to fit this circle into this Square for instance so

I only see the square but I can see the kind of circle hiding inside side so how we do that is in the layers panel you'll see that this circle is above the green square basically what we do this is called clipping now okay so for clipping we click and drag onto the Layer just like I am here and let go and you can kind of see it's made a group in the layers panel but also you can see that the circle is now hiding inside of the square so we can move it around within

there and it's done exactly what we wanted it to if you click away and then you click back on you can move this square around independently and the circle moves with it if I want to move the circle inside and change its location slightly I could just double tap and get through to the layer inside now this is called a child layer the circle is now a child layer so if you look on the layers panel we have our parent layer which is the green square and our child layer which is the pink circle inside

now if I click on it again there is a little option in the context toolbar that says lock children so remember the children is the actual child layer the little circle inside so if I click on that and then I move this up and down it's not manipulating the shape of that Circle that we put in there it's locked the child layer but if I uncheck it and then I go back down and squash it down you see it's reacting with how I'm changing the shape of this Square So that is clipping you clip a

circle inside of a square now let's talk about masking so let me just delete this one let's talk about masking this one here so for this one I want the blue circle to act as a mask so I can see through to the square so what I will do is I'll go to the layers panel I'll click on that and I'll just drag it down and onto the actual icon so I'm going onto the actual Square this time not over to the left so onto that square and I let go and now you can see

a mask has appeared I can click on the drop- down arrow and I can see it there let's play around with it so now I've clicked it I'm basically looking through a hole and I'm moving it around to reveal different parts of the square this is called masking and again if I click off of it and click back on I can just play around with the square shape and if I click on the actual mask layer in the layers panel now I can move around the Circle this is really useful for photos if you're trying

to frame a photo in a circle for instance in this section we'll be covering the insertion tools these tools will allow you to predetermine where your new shape will end up so if we look at it it's up in The toolbar and the first one says insert behind selection so that's where my new layer will end up so let's go ahead and select it now I can go and select a rectangle and now I will just click and draw out a square and you can see it already knows to go behind the circle so it

inserted behind the selection let's go ahead and delete that and try the second one insert at the top of the layer so I'm going to select it and try again click and drag so you can see how it works now and the last one just like clipping and masking you can go ahead and select it it says insert inside the selection so of course my circle is selected I can go ahead and click on it and I will do the same action again I'll click and drag out right now you can't see it because it's

actually inside and when I let go you can see that it's just in the bounds of this circle and if we go over to the layers panel we can see that it has been clipped inside see there it is this is the child layer now so that's the insertion tools so far in this tutorial we haven't really cared too much about where our objects are landing let's say I wanted the head in the center of the body I don't know Exactly where it is I can try and Eyeball it but I'm not certain so let's

be certain and I want to introduce you to guides and snapping this is going to help us achieve this goal so we'll start off with guides how do we get those well there are a couple of ways of doing it but one of them is to go up to view and guides here click on that this box appears is our guides box and you can see here on the left horizontal and vertical guides I want to Center this party goer right in the center of our canvas our document so I'm going to click on this

little icon here and add one so that has automatically added one to the center of the document and if I click on the horizontal one as well that will also go into the center so this is the absolute center of our document so that's very handy if you no longer want these guides you can just select them and click on the bin or you just press remove guides there you can also change the color of them but I suggest just leaving them until you get familiar with affinity okay let's press close now so we're ready

to try so I'm going to click on the body and try and move him to the center but as I do it you can see well it it's not Kind of centering it's still just moving wherever it wants to well this is where we introduce snapping if we go up here there's a magnet icon if we click on that and we go back to our body I can click on it and move it and now you see it's kind of snapping it's acting like a magnet to that guide which is really helping us to get

it centered so let's go and have a look at these options cuz you can see a little arrow next to it I'm going to click on it and something to note is just candidates yeah these are kind of presets of all of these boxes that are ticked right now it's considering what to snap to so I said I want immediate layers as the options to snap to what are my immediate layers well all of these shapes around them there are immediate layers if I want to do candl it list I can click on that this

goes further into it but we're just going to start off with immediate layers and if you can see the other option there immediate layers and children remember they're not actually talking about children they're talking about a shape that maybe you have clipped inside another shape and then all layers as well so looking at these options One of the ones that we definitely want is snap 2 guides and that one is selected so I'm happy with that so let's go ahead and close this and as you can see when you snap into the center it's green

on the vertical axis there and if I just go down slightly and I snap to this one you can see it's red the horizontal axis I don't really care about that one right now all I care about is getting the body centered okay moving on to the Head let's just grab that and drag it across you see it's very easy to get centered so I'll drag it up to about there I know that they are completely centered and for the hat I don't really need the snapping on right now so there's two ways you can

go about this because you can see as I'm trying to place it where I want it keeps snapping to areas I don't need so one of the options is to go up to snapping turn it off and then you can move it around and it's nice and smooth or you can keep it on and then when you've clicked and dragged on it you see right now it's still happening I can hold my finger on the option button or the alt button on the keyboard and now it temporarily disables it so I can place it wherever

I want there let go And you see snapping is still activated across the document Okay so we've sorted out our party goer let's move him off to the side a little bit and show you another way of using guides so I don't always have to go up to view guides Etc what I can do is just go up to these rulers either on the top or the left and just click and drag down and that creates a new one so maybe I'll Place one here so I'll drag this Square over here and just snap it

there you can see on the vertical axis it's green on the horizontal it's red that lets me know that it is touching those guides okay let's drag this one across here and snap that into place and this one just to make sure I'm going to drag it up here and there if you want another vertical you just drag from the side okay by the way if you want to get rid of these you can just double tap on any of them so I double tap that one and you see it brings me through it highlights

the vertical guide that I just double tapped if I no longer want that anymore I just press the bin icon if you want to get rid of of all of them of course remove all guides and press close so I hope that was useful here's another scenario let's Say I take this box and this box here and I place them together like this and I can see the snapping is helping me determine whether they are together but if you want to be extra sh you can go up here into View mode and click on wireframe

mode when I click on that you see it's just showing us kind of faint colors but it's showing us the outline in Black so we can really tell whether they are together or not and that is completely snapped together if I go off of it slightly and let's say I just move it in a little bit and I go on wireframe mode you see it's showing me that it is overlapping and if I want to be really sure I can just do this click off of both of them and you can see there's no overlap

there in this section I'm going to be showing you lots of ways of duplicating objects so the ones I've shown you already are the Old Faithful as I call it and that is simply you select the item you press command C and then you press command V and now you have a duplicate that you can drag out I'll delete that the next one is quick and easy so you select the item you hold down command click and drag and you have your copy you can just keep clicking and Dragging command click drag okay so let

me go back the next one is from the layers panel so I know I've got it selected here but if we go over to the layers panel and we right click and we go down there it says duplicate I can click that and now we have a duplicate and finally there's power duplicate I'll just change the color for this a lot more powerful so there it is what we do is we press command J and we have a duplicate just like before I'll just drag that out while it's holding shift to keep it in a

straight line so the action I've just taken is kind of recorded when I press command J so if I was to press command J again you can see there's equal distance between them all so I can keep pressing that and I keep getting the same result I'll delete those if I click off it and then on it again I can apply a new command J so I'm going to press command J now I'm going to move it I'm going to make it slightly smaller and then I'm going to press command J again and you can

see it's duplicated not only the distance I dragged it but also the size of the object so that's power duplicate so here's how to duplicate around a circle slightly advanced in this stage But if you want to know here it is so I'll select this upside down triangle here and the next thing you do is just go up to the context toolbar and you see this little crossair here it says enable transform origin I'm just going to select that I'm going to click and drag this little crossair that appeared see that blue one I'm going

to click and drag it to about here that's it okay now we'll use power duplicate so I'll press command J we have our duplicate as you can see in the layers panel now I'm going to drag this handle over here and you know what I'll just hold down shift shift so it will go in increments I'll drag it to about there and that's it I press command J as many times as I want well until it finishes and there we go we've duplicated around a circle getting more technical now here's another one where you can

move and duplicate at the same time so just draw out your object whatever it is here's my triangle it's selected all I have to do is press return on the keyboard This popup box appears and basically it has a few options for us we're going to click on duplicate cuz that's what we want to do we're going to keep it on number of copies one For now and then you can play around with these settings so the horizontal one maybe let's put it at 50 and I'll press return and you can see it's made a

duplicate 50 pixels across then you've got vertical I'm just going to Chuck in 10 here and then I'm going to play around with the rotation so maybe I'll put that at um let's say 15° and I'll just leave it at that for now I can play around with a scale and make it bigger as well yeah let's do it 110 okay so it's getting slightly bigger now this is where the magic happens number of copies I could just grab this and drag it to the side and you can see what's happening there it's duplicating and

twisting and getting bigger you can get very creative with this but I just thought I'd show you okay moving on in this section we're going to be covering our artboards artboards are like multiple canvases within a single document so in front of us we have a document and we have just one canvas here don't we so artboards will allow you to work on different design parts or parts of a project simultaneously without needing to create separate files so looking at what's on screen right now we do have one canvas and A design on it but

perhaps we want to duplicate this and then make variations of it maybe we want to change the color of this triangle here and we want to see them side by side this is where art boards come in useful so if we head on over to the tools panel and we select artboard tool in the context toolbar you'll see size we'll have a few options here right now it says document and this will be based on the size document that we have right now it's 1920 x 1080 pixels if you remember when we were setting it

up so if I click on document you can see we have a bunch of other options some of them very very old look iPhone 5 is there but we won't bother with any of that we'll just keep it on document for now and then we can just select insert artboard so I've selected that and you can see outside this artboard it's all turned lighter gray now and we have a name above our canvas that says artboard one we can go ahead and name that to maybe design one and then press return and you can see

now it says design one if you look in the layers panel It also says design one and if you click on the drop down arrow you can see everything that is in your Art board okay great well what if we want want to make a duplicate next to it well we'll just go up to the artboard tool again select that and we can click on insert artboard as you can see it's made a duplicate of the same document we had so we can go ahead and create a different design but if we wanted to create

the same design again well I wouldn't do that I would just delete this artboard so see I can select it and I can press delete so I could just copy and paste this so what I like to do is hold down command and shift and click and I just duplicate it this way and now I have my second artboard and I can go ahead and rename this artboard design two and then maybe I change the color of this slightly so now I have two different artboards that I can work on simultaneously and compare side by

side and also I'll just mention that if you click on the artboard tool again you don't need to just press insert artboard you can just cck click and draw out your own one so if I click and drag you can see I could see the dimensions right next to it I could just let go at this point and now we have a new art board but what is the size of it well you can go down to The transform panel here and you can change the width and height just by selecting it and typing in

whatever you want so I could actually make it 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels and now I know the size of that artboard and when it comes time I can go ahead and and Export each one individually or all together at the same time in a PDF that's the artboard tool let's move on in this section we're going to be covering the alignment tools now these tools are very handy to quickly align or space out single or multiple objects I have one object in front of me that I'm going to test it out on and also

I have a vertical and horizontal guide that I've placed there just so you can see where it lands so with my shape selected I'm going to go up to the toolbar and click on alignment the first set of options we have say align horizontally if I go ahead and click on align left you can see it's gone to the left of our canvas and if I go to align Center you can see especially with the guides being there it is in the center and same thing for Align right just underneath there you can see it

says align to spread our spread is our canvas right now so that's what It's aligning to but if you did include margins in your document you could choose align to margin okay so let's go ahead and select align Center and now align vertically these are basically the same set of options but aligning vertically so I will just go ahead and click on align middle and it's done it and you can see from the guides it's worked and when you're done with aligning you could just go ahead and click on apply as you can see auto

distribute is grayed out and so is this other option here so let's test it out on multiple objects okay we now have multiple objects all space bced out very oddly and let's sort them out with the alignment tool so I'm going to go ahead and select them all and now we'll go up to the alignment options so the first thing I want to do is to align them all vertically so what I'm going to do is go to align vertically so they're all in a straight line and I'll click on align middle now that I've

selected that I can see that they are all aligned vertically but I want them to be spaced out evenly so I'm going to go up to align horizontally and I'm just going to go right to the end there this was grade out before and I'm going To click on Space horizontally and I've done that and now they're all evenly spaced out if I wanted more control about how they're distributed I could go up to Auto distribute uncheck that and now there'll be zero pixels between all of them but if I go ahead and click on

the drop- down arrow I can drag this up or down however much I want or I could go and enter in a value that suits me 100 pixels and then what I'm happy I can press apply and I can just click and Center it okay let's try the alignment tools on multiple objects that are different sizes and spaced unevenly and let our main goal be that they're all exactly the same size okay so I'm going to select all of them like this and here's the key you have to decide which one you want all of

the rest of them to be like so I want this object here the center one this one to be the key object so I'm going to hold down option or Alt on the keyboard and click this one is our key object now so now I can go up to alignment and we'll just align them horizontally first so I'm going to press space horizontally okay that's done excellent align vertically I'm going to select align middle so I'm happy with the way it looks but now I want them all to be the same size as my key

object so I go down here it says make same obviously this is a circle so the width and height are the same on this key object so I'm just going to select one of them and you can see when I've pressed it they're all a bit all over the place aren't they but our original item is still the same so we just have to click on maintain aspect ratio and it's done very easy to do okay let's try it on something that isn't exactly the same dimensions either side okay so this bunch of tall triangles

are rotated all over the place it's a big mess so we can quickly select them all choose our key object obviously I want this one so I'm going to press option or alt on the keyboard select that that's my key object go up to alignment tools align horizontally space horizontally yes align vertically to the center yes and now we go down to make same I'll press rotation and that's it they're all in line all the same size very easy to do just a few clicks in this section we're going to be covering the corner tool

and I have a few objects on screen that we're going to test it Out on so starting with the first one this yellow Square here I'm going to zoom in so we can have a closer look so it's currently selected and if I go over to the tools panel on the left hand side there's the corner tool you can click on that or press C on the keyboard that's your shortcut so what we notice is in the context tool bar it says Corner type and everything is grayed out the only thing I can click is

bake appearance and I don't want to do that just yet so if we go ahead and look at our shape we can see the nodes are active now but if we look in the layers panel it still says rectangle so remember before you can use a shape and it is a rectangle but then you can convert it to Curves so you can see those nodes and further customize so as soon as I went into the corner tool it's showing me the node so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select this corner

here and look as I hover over the node you can see a little icon that means it's the corner tool I can click and drag and my finger is held down and if you look at the context toolbar those Corner types are no longer grayed out and there's a radius which is telling me how many pixels I Guess this corner is so I want you now before I let go of my finger look at the layers panel if currently says rectangle under the yellow Square when I Let Go it turns into a curve so it's

basically like converting to Curves when I do this action so what if I made a mistake and I want to continue playing around with this corner well I'd head on over to the corner tool again click on that and now you can see the handle is there so you see this red little circle that is our handle so I can click that and I can drag it in and out and we can look at the top and you can see there's different Corner types so what I'm going to do I'm going to head on over

to the top right node and I'm going to click and drag that in and now I'm going to choose a different Corner type so this first one is none that basically will make it back to how it was which is a pointy corner I can click this one which is a round corner but we're going to go for this option straight so now we have a straight edge we can pull it in and out excellent let's move on to the next one bottom right node let's use concave and look what that does so there's our

concave option and the last One will'll just do it to complete it click and drag and basically that one is called cutout so the only other thing up here apart from this radius which you can enter in manually or drag this up and down the only other thing here is bake appearance and I'm not going to click that just yet that's going to convert it to Curves like we've done previously what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit the move tool and I'm going to show you what happens if you scale down and

scale up so right now I'm going to hold shift and command and just click from a corner and scale down you can see it's not kind of retaining its original look as I scale down and if you don't want that this is where bake appearance comes in or convert to Curves so with the move tool selected we can see up here in the context toolbar I can click convert to Curves but because we're in the corner tool tutorial I'm going to go over to the corner tool click on that and you see here it says

bake appearance basically that is exactly the same thing it's just going to bake in that look it's going to convert everything I've done into curves so I'll go ahead and click on it so now That I've clicked on it I can no longer see those handles and everything is just nodes isn't it so now let's go ahead and click on the Move tool again and scale it down so click and drag down and you can see it's retaining its style okay let's move over to this other square that I've created still a rectangle cuz I

used the rectangle tool and what I'm going to show you here is basically selecting multiple nodes to apply this effect so I'm going to go over to the corner tool click on it and this time I'm going to click and drag over these two nodes and I'm going to click and drag down on one of them and you see it affects both of them and of course you can go back to the corner tool and choose your different types of corner so I'll just leave it on that for now also I just want to give

you a little bit of a hand now although we're going to go into this a bit later is selecting nodes that aren't right next to each other so let me demonstrate so command Zed to go back okay we're back to our original Square I'm going to select the corner tool again and let's say I want to select this node on the bottom right and this node up here on the top left so as this Node is selected I can hold down shift and I can go over to whatever other node I want and select that

as well now I can let go so top left and bottom right are selected and now I can just go to the corner tool which is selected already and just drag like this so that's one way of selecting them I will get into this further later but if I just deselect that and I'll go back to the corner tool I will just show you how to to select in a different way so if you just hold down option or alt on your keyboard click and drag and see like I can draw now so I can

draw down here get that one and that's it so by using that shortcut I can select nodes that are maybe in difficult places okay let's move on and actually do it on something that looks like a glass it's very simple I know but basically here is where I want to show you you can use this corner tool on multiple different objects object so we've got this object here and we've got this object here so I'm just going to select both of them so you can either do this like I did it before so I've selected

the blue part and now I'll select the drink part by holding shift by the way you can do this from the layers panel As well so if we go down I haven't labeled them I should have done really this is our drink this is our kind of glass part so I can select one of them hold down command and click by the way if you're selecting more than that you can just hold down shift and let's say you go down to here and just click on the last one but if you're selecting individual ones you

just hold down command maybe you want to select that that that you see how it works so anyway I'm selecting both of them now I'm going to click on C on the keyboard that's our Corner tool now I'm just going to select all of those nodes down here and I'm going to drag it up like that just cuz I want a smooth corner there and I'm going to let go so right now I can see that this corner didn't really work so well not sure why but I can just play around with that one so

I'll just click off and I'll click on again just to the drink select this node and I'll drag the handle out a little bit more so it looks a little bit more even and maybe this one a little bit more as well there we go I'm happy with that so you can use the corner tool on multiple different objects let's do one more Example of that with a lot more objects so here I have a bunch of triangles basically they're not connected what I'm going to do is just select all of them I'm going to

hit C for the corner tool I'm going to click and select all of these top ones and I'm going to drag it down like this okay great but what if I wanted to make this little section smooth as well well that's where something else comes in and that's called the Boolean operations where you can add together multiple shapes and this is what the next section is about so here's just a little taster so I'm just going to press command Z to go back so they're all individual ones I can go ahead and select them all

and I'm going to go up to buan operations and I'm going to click on ADD now you can see in the layers panel that it's just one layer and I can just drag that one layer around so it's all just one now we'll get into this in the next section but now we're going to use the corner tool so I'm going to press C on the keyboard and I'm going to select all of these nodes at the top here now I'm just going to click on any of these nodes and click and drag and you

can see how it works on all of these nodes And produces this really nice smooth wavy pattern and if I if I really like this I can go ahead and click on bake appearance and there we go moving on to the next section oh actually there's one more thing that I almost completely forgot to tell you so if you just go ahead and grab your rectangle tool and just draw one out basically you can use the corner tool from here without even entering the corner tool so if we look in the context tool bar remember

it always helps us out this bit it says corner and of course I showed you this earlier where you can just choose the corner type straight Etc so we'll just keep it unrounded you can also head over to here you see it says single radius if I uncheck that gives me all of these other options and basically TL means top left so it be this section TR top right and you get it so I could do in each individual corner separately so here I can just do maybe a little bit on the top right I

can do maybe a lot more so just so you know you can actually do some of these actions within the shape cuz they're quite smart okay now we can move on in this section we're going to be covering Boolean operations and basically this Allows you to add multiple shapes into one shape or using one shape to cut into another shape so in the last section I showed you how to add all of those triangles together as one shape basically this is what this will allow us to do plus more so where are these well they're

in the toolbar just up here you see they're all grayed out right now so we need to select a couple of objects or shapes I have a pink circle and a blue square so I'm just going to select both of them so first one is selected I'm going to hold shift and click the second to shape now they're both selected we can see they're no longer grayed out and we can play around with them so the first one is ADD and as you might imagine it would add these shapes together but before I click it

I just want you to take note in the layers panel the pink circle is above the blue square so when I click add I want you to know that the pink circle will take on the color of of the layer underneath so I'm going to press it now add so there we go they are now just one shape one layer in the layers panels you can see and also it's turned blue so simple enough if you were then to click on the Node tool You can see that you can further play around and customize this

shape but we're not going to do that we're just going to press command Zed to go back okay time to move on to the next one subtract so I select both of them again and I I'll go up to subtract I'll click on that so basically the circle has acted like a cookie cutter into the square underneath so looking at these icons anything that is blue remains anything that is gray disappears so let's move on to the next one so I'll press command Zed to go back they're both selected let's use intersect so I'm going

to click on this intersect and you see just like the image here the blue one Remains the gray has gone command Z to go back let's try xor okay let's go up to xor and I click on that and basically it's done the opposite of what we previously did on intersect and there is nothing left in the middle again we'll press command Zed to go back and try divide you can see where this is going right so it's just going to divide all of these into three different shapes as it shows there so up there

I'm going to click on divide and we can see that actually the colors of the circle Remain and so does the square but if we pull it apart so I'll click on this that's one layer that's two and that's three so basically this has cut into the shape based on where the outline was so I'll just demonstrate that by pressing command Zed to go back and it's back into its original form okay so if we head on up to wireframe view mode just up here click on that if we zoom in we can see where

these outlines intersect and basically this is where it is cutting and it's leaving those three individual shapes left okay let's uncheck that okay this next one is merge curves and the icon isn't exactly clear what this does but imagine if you have two objects here they're two different layers and you want them to just remain on the same layer you want to merge these curves so select both of them go up to merge curves click on that and now you see although it's taken on the color of the blue they are now acting like one

individual item but this is more handy to use when you are drawing with a pen tool and I know we're going to go into that later but I'll just demonstrate quickly so I'm going to grab the pen tool and I'm just going to create a few Lines here okay so let me go give it a stroke and increase that stroke a little bit okay so we've got one I'm just going to use power duplicate here just to uh show you okay so we have 1 two 3 four layers here and what if I just wanted

them to act as one well I'd select all of them all of these individual curves and click on merge curves now they just act as one if I head into the node tool click on that you can still see I can play around with them individually but I can just move them with the move tool easy like that okay moving on in this section we'll be covering the geometry tools now it's a little bit Advanced for a beginner but I wanted to place it here as it's similar to the Boolean operations where you're you know

using a shape to cut into another shape or separating different curves so skip ahead now if it's not for you and come back when you're ready so the geometry tools can be found right next to the Boolean operations and of course they grade out just like before so I just want to start off with the first one which is separate curves and if you are watching the Boolean operations if you are watching the section just before this you'll Know that we selected a bunch of objects and then we merged those curves by pressing merged Curves

in Boolean operations and then they just turned into one layer in the layers panel if you look over there so in this section it's basically the opposite of that so you want to separate the curves right now I can just move them around as one and you can see it's just one layer if I go up to the geometry tools and click on separate curves you can see it's now broken it down into four separate squares I'll delete those same thing for this this is an example we used before they are merged right now as

you can see just one layer I can go up there and press separate curves again and now you can see they are each individual movable curves moving on to the next one is fill holes and you know of course it's very easy to understand what that is cuz as I drag it around you can see there's holes punched in this Square so simply go up to geometry and click fill holes uh this is quite useful perhaps if you're downloading Vector items from different websites and you're trying to customize them to your liking maybe they have

some holes in there You could just click on pill holes okay I'm going to show you cut curves with key objects first just because it's a little bit more useful full I don't really use remove inner curves too often but cut curves with key objects this one here so this is it down here I've basically made it look exactly the same so we have two items here two objects and they're overlaying each other so if I select both of them and I go up you can see that it's gray out cut curves with key objects

so how do I activate that well this section here this object I want this to act as a knife and I want it to cut into this circle underneath so with both of of them selected I'll simply hold down option or alt on the keyboard and then I choose the layer I want to be the knife so obviously I wanted this s to be the knife so I'm just going to select that and you can see in the layers panel it's slightly lighter this is now our key object our key cutting object now I can

go up and you can see it's highlighted and I just click once on it and you can see it's broken it into two pieces and that little s acted like a knife okay I'll just quickly cover remove inner curves so we will use This as an example there's two separate objects okay if we merge them together so I'm going to select both of them and go up to merge Curves in Boolean operations now they just are one shape here and but what if we wanted to remove all of these inside curves here and just keep

this outline here well seems as they're merged we can go up to geometry and click on remove inner curves and it's gotten rid of everything that was inside of that outline okay let's move on in this section we're going to be covering compound shapes and much like the Boolean operations we used before compound shapes allow us to non destructively add or cut away from a shape let me demonstrate so much like before we have a circle and a square and I'm going to Overlay it just like last time and also just like last time I

can go up to Boolean operations okay but before I click anything here I need to ensure that it's going to be a compound shape so there's a couple of ways of doing it one of them is to go up to layer and then click on compound group that's one option another option is to go over to your Boolean operation and you decide the one you want hover over it hold down The option or ALT key on your keyboard and then simply click so it looks like nothing has changed it just added them together like last

time but if we look in the layers panel and I'll just drag that to the top there you can see it says compound and it has a little arrow next to it and I can click on that and it will reveal what's inside so these are technically now the child layers so I can just select the circle and click on it and move it around so it looks like they're separate but actually they are together so I'll demonstrate that by clicking on the actual compound layer the full one in the layers panel and then let's

apply a gradient to it so I'm going to head on over to the gradient tool shortcut G and I'm going to click and drag it down like this and you can see that it is just one layer okay I'll press command Zed to go back and click back on the Move tool I want to show you what this little icon is here so within the compound layer there is this little icon next to the ellipse tool and basically this is the same icon that is add in the Boolean operations so it's telling me what it's

doing but I don't have to keep it like this like I said it's Non-destructive so we can click on that and we can cycle through to subtract maybe so if you look at the shape it's now cutting into the square in intersect xor so there we go it's non-destructive but let's keep it on ad for now okay let's get another shape involved I want to add this triangle into here so the way I do that is to Simply go to the layers panel click on the triangle and I will just drag it up into it

so now it's part of this compound group and I can drag it across and just to make sure I'll click on the compound layer again and change the color and you can see it's all one shape but what if you don't have any more shapes left to drag into that group and you want to create your own shapes based on these tools on the left hand side well first of all you go over to the compound layer and click on one of the child layers these are the layers that are part of the parent layer

which is the compound so you let's click on triangle the child layer I can head on over and let's grab a star and now if I just click and drag star out you can see it's now taken on that same color and it's part of the compound group I'll just press the move tool and move it Somewhere a little bit better so maybe here so with each of these shapes you can decide what they do but let's keep it all on ad and then if you're happy with this then you can make that permanent move

of converting it to Curves but as a beginner compound groups are really handy because you don't actually have to commit until you actually really need to so I'll just go ahead and click on convert the curves now and you can see it's all just one shape now there's no compound compound layer and that's it the only way to go back though would be to press command Zed okay so as I press command Zed you can see it's a compound layer again if it didn't like what I was seeing there and I just wanted to start

a fresh you can actually just select all of those layers so I select the first one hold shift select the last one and I'll just drag it out of that compound layer and you see it's just an empty compound layer now I can press delete and we're back to our original shapes so that's how to create compound shapes in this section I'll be briefly covering the knife tool I've covered most of the tools of affinity in depth on my channel so you can go and check that Out for a more in-depth review of it so

where is this tool well it's on the left hand side in the tools panel the shortcut for it is K this is the icon I've to redesign the icon so it's more identifiable so let's go ahead and click on the knife tool and you can see the icon has changed of my cursor it's now a knife and you can also see in the context toolbar we have some options but for now I'm just going to use it as default so on this ellipse here that was selected I'm just going to click and I'm going to

drag down like this and when I Let Go what has happened if we look in the layers panel it's now two layers and what I can do just while still in the knife tool I can click once on that section and it's highlighted it and I can either press delete and that's just gotten rid of that section or I can press command Zed to go back and I can either head to the move tool which is V and I can click and move it across maybe I want to create something like that or I can

press a the node to tool and start playing around with this side a little bit more but as you can probably see it's quite a jagged edge not very smooth so what I'm going to do is press command Zed to go back to its original state now I'm going to use K on the keyboard I'm going to use that shortcut now we going to head up to the context toolbar so the first one it says options straight line I'll click it now I'm going to click and drag see this is just dragging out a straight

line so I could just Lop the top off and of course you can include the shift key to keep it in a straight line so I can let go and now it's just looped the top off like an egg and there it is so press command Zed again the next option is autoc close so if I click on autoc close and I will click off of straight line again basically I can do this I could go inside of it draw a line and then you see that little red dot as soon as I go close

to it it's going to connect together and complete the shape and now it's cut a little hole out so if I press V I can just remove that okay I'll press command Zed again and go back to the knife tool I'll click off of that and the next one is stabilizer stabilizer is available in the pen and pencil tool which you'll see and the paintbrush tool the vector brush tool so I'm going to select that and the first option under stabilizer is rope Mode and the next one is Window mode Let's just quickly use rope

mode and I'll just show you so rope mode I'm dragging along and you can see there's this rope that's helping me make it a little bit smoother okay great but let me press command Zed to go back you see this length if I just click on that and drag it up I can increase the length of that rope so again I can click and see the Rope is a little bit longer and it's making it a lot smoother and there we go that's really nice and smooth isn't it so that was rope mode I'll press

back a few times and we'll try the last one which is Window mode and when I click on Window mode it says window 25 so let's just try it click and drag it and if you can see when I speed up it kind of follows me like a rubber band that's what that's doing the window so if I just press command Zed one more time and we increase that window I will click and drag from over here and you see it's kind of a lot more controllable and there we go so I kind of call

that rubber band mode so that is the knife tool if you want to see more go see the full tutorial in this section we're going to be covering the Contour tool the shortcut for that is o on the keyboard and this is what the icon looks like and it's over on on the left hand side in your tools panel so if you click on that we can get started so the Contour tool is basically going to allow us to offset our path so if we click on this shape here this gray Square our path is

basically this square shape here so if I go ahead and click and drag it in we've offset the path so the original shape there is shown by the blue outline and obviously the new one where we're dragging it is our new location for this path and we we can drag it out as well and you can see it goes beyond those boundaries so I'm going to let go now so why has it given us a rounded Edge there Why didn't it stay nice and pointy well let's go up to the context toolbar and have a

look at the options so we have radius where we can drag it in and out and also we have Contour type and this might seem familiar from the corner tool so we have round joins that's what it's on right now that's why it's rounded corners and then we have miter joint joins basically sharp corners and then we have bevel joins and you can see what that has done but Let's keep it on the round joins for now and then you've got miter and that will help you with your miter joins and then we've got cap

these options here better to use these on an open curve like the one down the bottom this black line stroke basically so let's go onto fill right now it's on autoc closed but if we click on the next one which is force open it basically punches a hole through that shape so if I click and drag in and out you can see what it does it's basically looks like an outline now you can play around with that as much as you want and the last one is force closed but I'll keep it on Force open

and let's say I'm happy with it I can press bake appearance and now it's nodes that we can play around with and manipulate further you can also use the Contour tool on text and this comes in really handy so I'm going to go ahead and select the text here it's still typable by the way so there we go I'm going to go ahead and click on the Contour tool again and then I'm going to just drag it inwards like that just to make it skinnier so this works doesn't it but it's a little bit rounded

in the corners there so you just go up to Contour type and select the one You want so I'll just select MIT to join and look it's just a skinnier version of those letters and you can drag it out as well of course so I'm going to press command Zed to go back CU I want to show you a use case for it and of course you could do this with the stroke panel but this one is pretty handy it's it's quite quick to do basically so we have high let's say I wanted to create

a sticker I'm going to create an outline to it maybe two outlines of different colors so what we'll do is just duplicate it to begin with so I'll press command J and you can see in the layers panel we have two copies now with the one underneath I'm going to change the color to purple and now I'm going to hit o on the keyboard for the Contour tool and I'm going to click and drag out and you see if I drag it all the way out like this this is why could be handy for stickers

because all these letters are now joined up so they could be printed as one or good for t-shirts as well there's many use cases for this tool so I've done one let's make another copy of this one so I can press command C command V this time and let's change the color again so I'll just choose this Color I guess and we can click and drag down and you can see what it does get creative with this one okay moving on to the next example we have a circle and I've just used the Boolean operations

to to attach a triangle onto it basically so it's a little bit more unique and we have our trusty Square in the background basically with this one what my goal is is to create an outline and then cut into this shape so there's a distance between them so what I'm going to do just like the text I'm going to command J that's to duplicate it I'm going to click on the bottom layer and I'm going to change that color to let's change it to White so it matches the background cuz I want to create that

distance now I'm going to click on o for the Contour tool and I'm going to click and drag outwards so there it is I'll just press on the Move tool so you can see it is just a white layer version of it and I'm going to press on the Contour tool again so we can get those options up you can see here it's rounded on this sharp corner I could click on miter if I want or the bevel as well but I'll just keep it on round cuz I think that kind of looks cool so

I'm happy With the way it looks there and now I want to cut into the blue shape behind so I'll go up to bake appearance and you can see it's just a curve now and now I can select whilst that's selected by the way I can hold shift and click on the shape in the background and then go up to Boolean operations and just click subtract and you can see now there's a nice distance between them and mission accomplished okay let's look at the last option and this is basically just one stroke and I'll just

go on the Node tool to show you it's just a stroke there's no fill or anything like that so with this one I'm going to click on o for the Contour tool again and I will just click and drag to see what happens and as you can see if I go right it goes bigger left goes a bit skinnier so basically it looks like it's creating a box just from a line which is cool so this is where the cap comes in handy so if you look up here at No Cap this is what it's

on right now if I go ahead and click on round cap we get a kind of long pill-shaped object so the Contour tool is basically very very handy let's move on in this section we're going to be covering the pen and the Node tool because they work seamlessly together really well just to note that I have made a very in-depth tutorial on the pen and no tool so you can go and check that out this will be for the basics okay so you can get a good understanding of how this works so we'll start off

with selecting the pen tool and like always it's on the left hand side in the tools panel and as I hover over it the shortcut is p on the keyboard so I'm going to select it and the first thing I'm going to to do is check my fill and my stroke of course I've already done it but for fill right now because we're just drawing these Strokes these outlines we want to set the fill To None So we just click on this button here and then we go over to stroke choose your color and then

we go over to the width and let's place it on 25 okay then click off of that let's begin so to start off with I'm just going to click once and then twice so so in its default State this is how it will work so you have two squares either end these are called sharp nodes and they're called sharp nodes because there's no curvature in this line so that's what we're going to concentrate on to begin with before We go up to the context toolbar and look at all those options so I'll zoom out and

we'll just keep drawing out these sharp nodes so I'll click again and again and again and you see there's no curves anywhere I'm just clicking once twice three times Etc so these are all sharp nodes and this blue line is our path so if you look in the layers panel we have one layer that's our sharp nodes layer and let's say we want to start drawing out another line well if I just start drawing over here if I click once more you see actually it's still thinks I want to continue drawing that so I'll press

command Zed to go back a step from this point you just want to press Escape so if I press Escape now you see the node it changed color that means that Affinity knows now that I'm finished with that line for now so let's start drawing these smooth nodes so to begin with I will just click and this time I will drag and you see this it's a circle and that is called a smooth node and these handles each side are called handles so from this point I can just let go see I've drawn it out

like that and this is the trajectory of the line so if I click around here and I click And drag you see it was going to be pointing up that way because that's the way the handle was facing okay so let's keep drawing those out so I'll click drag again and you see I could drag it really far and change it like this so I'll just keep doing this so we're only using smooth nodes right now and they've got handles on them as well those handles mean that we can play around with them later that's

where the node tool comes in but for now we'll just use the pen tool in its basic default state so I want to create a new line now I have two layers I press Escape let's make mix it up a bit so this time I will start off with a sharp note I'll click once and I will click once again there and then this time I will click and drag and you see we've got a kind of wave shape going on here I'll let go and I'll go to about here and I'll click and drag

and I'll do the same again here and then from here I'll just click once and you see when I click once it's just a sharp node if I don't drag it will end up being a sharp node and then if I click once more there we go so we've used sharp and smooth nodes in the same line okay let's press Escape so we can draw a new Line and this time I want to concentrate on those sharp Corners those cusps so this is where it gets a little bit more technical okay so we'll click once

and we will click and drag this time here really when you start you should click and drag if you want that to be smooth to begin with and then click and drag again okay so we have two smooth nodes there but what if I wanted that to be sharp now just remaining in the pen tool well there's an easy way you just press alt or option on your keyboard and you see as I hover over this handle if I hold alt or option see this little pointy icon appears basically that's telling me I can get

rid of that handle so I'm going to click once and now you see it's turned into a sharp node so from this point I can click and drag and you see now I have a sharp cusp there a sharp corner and I can go up and make another smooth one and let's say from this point actually we want another sharp one okay let's just do it one more time option and click and then drag like this there is another way as well which I'll show you on the next wave I guess so if we click

and drag to make another smooth node before we let go we can hold down Option and then we can just drag this handle to where kind of we want the next PATH to lead so if I let go at this point see it's facing down there if I just click and drag here you can see initially it wanted to go this way and now I'm dragging this way it's going in this curvature so let's do that one more time so I'll go up here and then I'll hold option I'll drag it around I'll let go

and then I'll click and drag like that so there's some of the basics of using the pen tool so here's a scenario when you first start using the pen tool you'll be clicking along as I showed you just now and then you'll press Escape because you're like I want to draw a new line and then you'll start drawing that new line and then you'll think oh no actually I wanted to continue drawing along the first line how do I do that well of course we'll press command Zed to get rid of those previous steps so

how do I continue drawing from this node here well it's simple you just hold down command and then you go ahead and select the node and now you can see it's changed color and that means I can continue drawing so click click click click click so right now this is considered an Open curve because I haven't completed the shape yet so I'll just show you by adding a fill so I'll just make that some kind of yellow color there and I'll just go back down I'll just hold down command and tap on that little one

again so it knows that I want to continue to draw out from there so right now it's open and you can see the fill yeah it's kind of looking a bit odd really isn't it what we want to do is complete the shape so as I hover over the first node that I started drawing from you can see a little icon it's a circle it's basically telling us the circle will be complete if we click here so I will and now this is called a closed curve we've completed the shape so this shape that we've

just drawn out is all sharp right it's sharp nodes all around and a little taster into the node tool at this point cuz the node tool and the pen tool they work together so closely that you almost don't realize you're using the no tool sometimes s so let's say this node here it's sharp right now what if we wanted to turn it into a smooth node well you just hold down command or control on a PC and you just hover over but you see before I hover over this has turned into the Node tool now

just so I could select this node so I'll click on it and then I'll let go you see I'm still in the pen tool and I still have the pen tools context toolbar options I can go over to convert right now sharp it's already sharp so we don't want that we can go to smooth and click on that great it's now a smooth node and that's what we wanted okay let's have a look at the different modes in the context toolbar so the one we started off with the one I've shown you so far is

just pen mode this one here so obviously we can do sharp nodes like that we can click and drag to get those smooth nodes and so on so I'll just delete that and we'll check the next one so this is called smart mode and it works slightly differently so if I just click once you can see it's round Circle looks like a smooth node but it has a little dot inside of it and if I just click once more up here I can see it already has handles on it looks slightly different this is Smart

Mode remember and when I click once more you see it's kind of worked out for itself what the curvature should be on this path and you can just keep clicking around like this and it will automatically decide How smooth each one should be and I'll finish the shape there and there we go so that's smart mode I'll press delete on that one so the next mode is polygon mode and basically this one is going to allow us just to draw in sharp straight lines and even if I click to drag to get that smooth node

it will not let me so you can just click around like this and you're never getting a smooth node okay next mode Let's have a look and it is line mode so this one I'll click once click twice click three times oh click four times so it only allows us to draw individual straight lines so I could do that it's not going to continue along so this could be quite handy if you're doing a lot of straight line work I guess press command Zed to go back get rid of those the last part I want

to show you is this one right at the end here it's called rubber band mode and if I select that one and we'll go back to our original pen mode so this one is quite cool actually so if I click once here and you see here it's just this line is already here I will click once again and then let's say I do a smooth node here when I Let Go it kind of has this projection line so it's kind of showing me what The curvature will be like if I tap here so I'll do

another smooth node here and this time I'll end with a sharp node so you see the curvature here if I click it was exactly as it projected so obviously now that I've got a sharp node it's gone to a straight line so I can just click once here but if I just click and drag there it already know knows I'm in the smooth node and it will give me that projection line again very handy so whilst I still have this shape open I just want to show you an action that you can perform so I

haven't closed the curve yet but I can go up to action and just press a button and it will do it for me so I can press close curve just up here when I click it it just knows exactly where the start and end node was and just fills it in okay let's briefly cover snapping whilst we're in the pen tool so we can enable snapping here but first of all I'll try and draw something without snapping so imagine I want to draw a straight line out like this and I want it to be perfectly

down in line with that well nothing is happening there's nothing snapping so I can just go up here and I can turn on this one here it says align to nodes of the selected Curve so I can click on that and now if I keep drawing you see as I hover over here this little line tells me I'm perfectly in line and it kind of magnetizes towards here so I could just click once here and when I go up you see here it's snapping to this node over on the left hand side and it's showing

me the dimensions between you see here the dimensions of the vertical and horizontal and I could just continue now and everything's perfectly in line so this could be very useful for you to use this and of course there are other snapping options if you want to know and go further in detail with that go and check out my full tutorial and of course right at the end you can click use fill or don't use use fill but you can also just do it from here fill like I did at the start okay okay now I

want to show you how you can just use the shift key to get perfectly straight lines so I'll click once there and I'll plan to drop my node over here somewhere but as I don't have snapping on I can just hold down shift and we get this yellow line here so I could just click there and I know I've got two perfectly lined up sharp nodes with a completely straight path and this Also works vertically as well so I can do that again and also it works when you're going up at an angle as you

can see I'll just go around like a clock so what I want to do now is just click on snapping and use both of them together so that snapping is highlighted and I will just hold down shift and click until I go up until it lines up with that node just over there so there it is so now I can just click and I know that's perfectly lined up so I've created a little assault course to test out all the things I've been talking about so I'm in the pen tool and just the pen mode

nothing else is selected so here we go let's zoom into the first one so this one these all look like they should be sharp nodes so I'm just going to click once there and once there and I'll just keep clicking on each of these points CU there's no curves here whatsoever so that was pretty easy enough so let's go to the next one in order to draw a new line I have to press Escape okay let's go down here and see what this is about so I know that I need to click and drag out

a smooth node here and maybe about here I will click and drag again and then it looks like it just goes down and Up here so I'm going to click and drag from there as well so from this point I can get rid of this handle so remember you can press option and you can click on the handle and that's got rid of it so now it's just a straight line going across but how do I make sure it's a straight line well I can either use the snapping option or the shift option so remember

the shift option here I'm going to use that one this time so I'm going to hold down shift and I'm going to click where I think it ends there this is another sharp node scenario so I'll click once there and this one here is definitely a curve so what I can do is click like this and I can let go and I'll do the same thing again option click on the handle and then this time I'm not going to use shift I'm going to go up to snapping click that on and I just want to

be able to go in a straight line and end about there so that was relatively easy okay great let's move on to this so we've got a wave and a sun so this sun is just a perfect circle there I'm going to press Escape so I can draw that new line so I'll try and figure out where the center is here so I'm going to click and drag out and I want to make sure That it's level so remember I can hold down shift and that will level it out and I've just kind of got

to decide how far I should pull out so this circle is going to have about four nodes on it so I'm going to click about here and drag out oh look I was almost right I'll go down to the center here and now look cuz snapping is still turned on I know that that is the center so click and drag out whilst holding shift okay and up here it's snapping so I can click hold down shift and drag up and the last one I can click and drag there we go so that's not too bad

it's not perfect uh I messed up little bit there that's where the node tool will come in which is next so on the last one let's try and Tackle this wave so because I close that last shape I no longer need to press Escape so I'll click once there I'll drag to about there and then I will drag out whilst holding shift so everything stays in line and I will let go so around about here I think I will click and drag like that and then on the last point I will click and drag like

this and before I let go cuz I know there's a cusp coming up I can hold down the option key and I can drag it around To where I think it should be so maybe somewhere like that I'll let go and I'll place my new one about here I'll click and drag it there almost perfect and I can do the same up here just click and drag until I get to this section here and I just click and drag out like that so I know I need to go straight down so I'm going to hold

down option click on that handle to get rid of of it so from this point I think I'll just hold down shift and to about here and because snapping is turned on I'll need this now so I'll just go over to this node and you see it's kind of meeting up I'll click and then I could just complete the wave so that didn't work out too bad actually let's move on to the node tool to see how that can help us in this section we're going to be covering the node tool so we've been using

the pen tool a lot and we just used it on that course that I just did but let's say that you didn't do too well if you were going to try it well you can use the no tool to clean this up so let's just learn by doing so I'm going to click on the no tool the shortcut is a so I've clicked on it and now I'm going to zoom in to this first one here and I'm going to try and Clean this up first of all I can select the item like I've done

there and I can see all the nodes if we look at the context tool bar we have many options but some of them are grade out so if I go ahead and just select one of the nodes you see some of the options appear so it's based on what you've selected it will give you different options so for the basics you can click on a node and you can move it around like this you can also click the path here and click and drag it like this and I'll just press command Zed to go back

and you can perform other actions but for now let's just try and tidy it up so it matches the Gray Line in the background let's go ahead and click on the first node and place it where we think it should be okay excellent and we'll just keep going through clicking the nodes and these are all sharp nodes as you can see and just clicking them so they all line up okay that was easy enough let's go to this next one it looks all over the place so I'm going to select it and I can see

the first node is the smooth node so I'm happy with that I'll just line that up properly and the next one this one really should be smooth so in order for us to Turn it into a smooth node we can either go up to convert options in the context toolbar and choose the middle one here which is smooth click on that there is another way to do it and that is if I press command Zed and that is when we hover over the node we can simply hold down control and click and that's turned it

into a smooth node again so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag it up here grab the handle and twist it around so these smooth nodes have handles and you can use the node tool to play around with them so the next one just looks slightly out of place so I'm just going to drag it down to about here and I'm just going to drag this handle inwards and across like this until it perfectly lines up so this next one should be completely flat so what I'm going to do is I'm

going to go up to the snapping options up here I'm going to click on that I'm going to go back to the node and I'm going to drag it down and you see it's snapping to the node on the left okay that's great so this one looks like it should be completely flat so what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this node up here and in fact I don't need snapping on right now because it seems To be snapping to something over there so I'm just going to place it around here and

one of the ways you could do it is this you can hold down option you can hover over this handle and click once on that and you can go over to there hold option and click so that's ALT key by the way as well for Windows another way you could do that is if I press command Zed to go back when you hover over the path here you can hold down option and you can see a flatline icon appears and I can just click once and then it just turn turns into a flat one and

it's got sharp nodes both sides so the next one is me just dragging it down and this seems like it went straight into place so I'm happy with that and lastly I know that this needs to be completely flat so I'm going to need to turn on that snapping again and just drag it down and there we go that's all perfectly lined up and I'm quite happy with the result so the next one is a circle I'll just turn snapping off for a second one of the things I could do is first of all just

try and get all all of these points where I think they should be so I'll drag that to here and this one to here and this one over here I will turn on Snapping at this point because I want all of these noes to line up because there's only four of them so I'm going to click on this one I'm going to drag it to about here and I know that lines up with this and I'll do the same with this bottom one here okay that's lined up nicely so I know I need to turn

this into a smooth node but I can always just drag this handle down and when it gets to a certain point it just just turns into a smooth node you see and with this one here I will just select this and I'll go up to convert and I'll click on smooth so it looks like I need to drag this handle out a little bit more so I'm going to drag that but I don't want it to affect everything else so I'm just going to press command Zed I'm going to hold down shift and I'm going

to click and it's going to stay perfectly vertical so I can just drag down there and I'll do the same thing with this side as well hold shift click and drag and I'll do the same thing for this side as well but this time I'll just use that shortcut and press control and click and that's turned into a smooth node again I can hold down shift click and drag up here if I thought that these were equal Both sides I could just hold down control click and drag and it will bring it out both sides

but you know what in this scenario I'm not going to do that I could hold shift just to double check no it's not quite there so what I'll do is press command Zed to go back and I'll just hold down shift click and just drag down H so that seems to be perfectly lined up okay so now we're going to try and line up this one and this is all over the place so we'll start from the beginning and this one is smooth node and I don't want that so I could just hold down option

and click once and it's turned it into a sharp node and yeah that's about right there in fact I could turn off snapping at this point because I can see it's slightly over so I can select both of those and bring them up slightly click off and then then continue along so this one looks like it's kind of almost in the right place but it seems like it's missing one so what we can do with a no tool we can add them so just hovering over this path I could just click once here and it's

added a node and obviously it's a smooth node because either side was smooth and I actually want this to be A sharp one so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to hold down option and click and drag that in like this and for this one up here I'll just click and drag it up to see whether it matches okay it's matching pretty well I think with this one I need to drag it out slightly and if I don't want it to move around when I'm dragging it I can just hold down shift

there we go for this one it just seems like I have to drag it in there and sometimes it's good to just try and drag all of these nodes into the place where you think they're going to be if you are tracing something that is and then make the changes that you need to so like this I know that that should be a sharp one so I'm going to hold down option click once so going back to this one to try and fix it I'll just drag this out slightly click on that node again drag

it out slightly there we go something like that and this needs to be played around with a little bit so I'll just click on that node and bring that up and this one could probably go down a little bit so that's done so I need to know that this is completely in line so what I'm going to do is just turn on snapping again this one here align To nodes of selected curves so I'll select that and you can see it's snapping to it so over here I can just grab this one place it in

the corner and you can see it's snapping to this one over here and actually it hasn't finished I have to continue drawing along so what I can either do is press on the pen tool again as it's selected and just click once on there and it's completed or I can press command Zed to go back or I can simply head on up to the context tool bar and under the action you can see one here it says close curve I could just click on that and it's closed it for me so this one here I'll

just select that you can see it has many nodes on it there's too many I think so there is this option and I don't use it that often but it's called Smooth curve so if I just click it once you can see there's less smooth nodes on there now I click it again there's even less and the more you click it it kind of tries to work out what's the best way to make it smooth and have less nodes it doesn't always work but it seems to be working pretty well okay I'll turn snap maing

off now and just show you how you can break things apart slightly so if I just select This circle here uh if we go up to action you can see break curve is there you'd have to select one of them first and let's say let's press break curve here so it looks like nothing's happened but if I go ahead and click on one side you can see it's broken it apart if I wanted it to go back together again I just simply click on it and drag and it's together again as one shape if that

doesn't work for you let me just break it again if that doesn't work for you you could simply put them close to each other and you could select both now this isn't going to work perfectly here so I've selected both nodes and then I could go up to join curves and now it's joined them together again but obviously it's not working so well so I could just delete that and then just hold down control and click and it's turned it into a smooth node and then I go about trying to fix it again also there's

another way if you want to break this apart into different sections let's say you don't want this path between these two nodes you could just hold down control on the keyboard and you see there's a little X there and I can just click once and now it's gotten rid of it and again Choose both of those nodes and you can join those curves again so you can either press Close Curves or join curves there okay I just want to briefly cover whilst you're in the node tool how to select things because we know how to

select you know this big object here but how do we select individual nodes so I'm in the node tool right now and let's say I wanted to select these three that's fair enough I could just do that and it's pretty easy I can click and drag all of those around but what if the selection was a little bit more difficult than dragging that well you could just hold down option click and you could just draw around the nodes that you want to change let's imagine if it was a little bit more difficult and then you

can perfectly select those three and then you can move them around another trick whilst these are still selected is to use use the transform button so up here underneath transform there's transform mode I'll click on that and now we can see this box basically I can move this box around like this kind of like I was before I'll press command Zed or I can grab this handle here which allows me to rotate all of these nodes at the same time Just like this and this can be really useful so you don't have to go about

changing every single individual node you make the wave a lot bigger you see and then once you're done that just uncheck that transform mode and then you can go in and just make the changes so it still looks okay so there we go okay now let's join forces the pen tool and the node tool together we'll use them in unison as we draw this wave again so I'll start off with a sharp node and I will hold down shift and I'll click and drag like that and if I go up I can click and drag

out a smooth node but let's say at this point I'm not happy with the direction it's going I could just hold down command and you see that temporarily puts us in the node tool and then I can drag these handles and drag them to wherever I think it should go but I'll just kind of leave it where it was and then from that point I can just go ahead and click and drag and if I'm not happy with how it's worked I could just click on command and drag this across the alternative would be for

you to go over to the node tool or just press a and then you're in the node tool permanently but then you'd have have to press P again to end up back in the pen tool so I like to use them together in this way so we know that we need to get rid of this handle so I'm going to click once there still in the pen tool I'm going to click and drag that there and oh no I've made a mistake quickly hold command drag it down a little bit and drag this out slightly

yeah there we go and now I'll continue drawing it okay I've made a mistake need to hold command click drag that over there and yeah this is looking okay okay I need to hold command click this one out a little bit so this is how you can use them together uh to make your design life slightly quicker obviously I need to use the snapping here so I can just hold down command click and drag there we go and now I can just click and finish it off so that's how you use them both together in

unison in this section we're going to cover pressure profiles and the width tool so far we have have been playing around with the pen tool and the stroke width so right now I've got an open curve just this outline I can go up to the stroke panel and I can play around with the width like this but it's all uniform it's all the same line weight isn't it but how do we make It let's say skinny on each side and then fat in the middle well this is where pressure profiles come in and also the

width tool and technically both those things I've just named do the same job but I want to show you the different scenarios where you can use them so just to let you know pressure profile is under the stroke tab up here and it's just this little one down here called pressure and the width tool is over there on the left hand side in the tools panel let's start off with pressure profiles so with my curve selected I'm going to go over to pressure and I'm going to click on it once you can see this little

graph has appeared and if I just click this one and drag it down you can see it's doing exactly the same thing as the stroke width was so what else can we do well if you click once on the left hand side you see the color changes slightly and then you can just drag this one down and you see it's gone thin on the other side over there and I can drag it back up and if I go ahead and click on this side here see right now it looks like there's a little dot in

the middle if you click once more that goes away and then you can drag it down just That side another quick way of doing that would be to just hold down option click and drag and then you could just drag it immediately so what else can we do well you can add extra nodes or pressure points I should say so in the middle I'm just going to click once and I've added a pressure point so now I can drag down and you see both the left and right side have gone skinny so if you look

at this graph the left side of the graph is like the left side of this stroke and the right side is like the right side of the stroke so it works kind of in unison as we drag it up and down but you don't have to end it there you can keep adding more so I've added another couple there and I'm going to be adding another couple here as well and we can see what that will do for us so you can see it's looking a lot different than what it originally looked and you can

play around with that as much as you want the pressure profiles and if you actually like one of these pressure profiles you can go ahead and press save profile and it will just be under there and then you could just click on it every time you select a new curve and it will have this kind of style on it so I'm Just going to press reset so that works pretty well for this but what happens if we use this pressure profile on a closed curve like this well basically when I click on the pressure profile

I have the wave selected now wherever you started drawing your first node and remember we started drawing it from the left side and then we went all the way around and then it ended here so I know that this is the kind of starting node so when I go ahead and drag this side down you can see that it's starting to become thin just on this side here and it doesn't look good right now does it so if we add a pressure point in the middle and then we go drag it down again we can

see that the thinnest part is here and that's where we first started drawing the wave so that was our first node we jotted down right now it also doesn't look too good so I'll just bring that up a little bit and let's say I want to really work on this area here I have to kind of guess where the thickest bit is so if I click on this bit here and make it thicker and maybe that thinner I know that that is the location of the there and it can get a little bit tricky if

I just wanted that point To be completely skinny so it's not always good in all scenarios to use this pressure profile we could go ahead and add that pressure profile we saved before from the line above and click it and this is what that will do okay I'll just press reset as that didn't look too great okay cue the width tool so we're going to go ahead and click on the width tool over here shortcut is w VI so I've clicked on that and now I will select the curve that I want to add it

to so I'll select this top one again basically we can just add a point in the middle to start off with so I'll just add a point there and you can see it's been added and there's some little handles there I can click and drag these in and out and if we look in the context toolbar at the options available to us the first two are this lock line weight so that is on right now so if you look if I drag in and out I can't drag out further than that cuz it's locked the

line weight to whatever the width was in the stroke panel so what I can do is uncheck that and then I can go ahead and bring it out as far as I want but I think it looked a little bit better before so I'm just going to press command Z I'll Lock that again what's the next option lock Point ordering so let me add another couple of points so I'll add a couple there so we've got three in a line now so as that one is already selected lock Point ordering I will drag this one

over here and look it doesn't let me go past this point here because I've locked the point ordering and it also doesn't allow me to go further out because I also have line weights locked as well okay what are the other ones snap to curve nodes so when I click on this one you'll see just there there's a little white dot if I go back to my node tool you can see there's one node there one node there and one node there if I just add a a couple more just so it's more obvious I'll

go back on the width tool and now you can see those little dots there basically this snapping option snap to curve nodes allows us to drag these widths that we included and when we go past the node it allows us to just snap to that node and that's pretty neat okay so the last option is under snapping snap two widths on same curve so if I select that one as well and let's say I uncheck lock line weight I'm going to drag this out really far and I'm going to add another width here and I'm

going to drag that out really far as well when I get to a certain point it will snap to the same width as this one so this one is the thickest one on the line and as I drag it out you can see it it kind of changes I'll zoom in in postp production for you so that is snapping to that weight if I had let's say this one here if I drag this out and then drag it back in again it's snapping and it's showing in purple the ones that it's similar to in width

so that's what all of those options do but let's just make it look okay should we I will lock the line weight here I'm going to bring this down and I'm going to bring this side down as well and you know what this one here I no longer need anymore so I'm just going to double click it and then I can get rid of the width point I can move this up and down to get the smooth look okay so I think that's done a lot more control with the width tool okay let's go down

to the wave and see what we can do with this one so I'm still in the width tool I'm going to click on it once and now I'm going to go up to our options I'm going to lock the line weight cuz I don't want it to get Thicker than that I'm going to click on Snap to curve nodes uh just so I can see the actual nodes of the curve I drew so I'm going to start adding my width points now so I think I'm going to add one around here and I'm going to

add one around here here as well and up here I'll just add one to this kind of top part here so I can start dragging that in CU I want this bit to be the thinnest part this sharp corner here and as the wave comes out it gets thicker and let's say I wanted it to be a lot thinner here maybe I'll just place it around there and drag that in okay that's looking okay there are some artifacts going on here so I can try and fix that by adding another point there we go I

fixed it and zooming out what I else thr I want to do I want to try and make this the same size as that side so I'm going to go up to my options again and I'm going to do snap to widths on the same curve so I'm going to select that one and I'm going to go ahead and click on this and you see it's snapping down and it's purple and you can see on the right hand side that is also purple so that is equal so I could just leave it at that and

the width tool did a pretty good job so Definitely use this width tool when you're using the pen tool or even the pencil tool so far with both of these objects we have applied the pressure profile on it and we saw how that affected the pressure profile graph and also we went on to use the width tool this is the one that we've used with the width tool so if I just select the top one you can see that has also created a pressure profile for that and the wave so this would be the pressure

profile for the wave that we created with the width tool so technically they're just doing the same thing but there's just different ways of going about it in this section we're going to be covering the pencil tool now we're going to cover it briefly but if you want an in-depth tutorial with lots of examples I have made one so go and check that out but for now let's find the pencil tool so over in the tools panel on the left hand side you can see there it is I will select it or you can press

n on the keyboard that's the shortcut so looking at some of these options in the context toolbar the first one is the stroke color you can select whichever one you want I've chose orange then we've got width this is Basically your stroke Str width just like the pen tool so I can click and drag this up and down and remember alternatively you could go to the stroke Tab and change the width from there so let's just click and drag now and I'll just try and draw out some kind of shape like this and just so

you know I'm using the trackpad on a Mac right now I'm not using a graphics tablet so we can see that the line is the same thickness all the way around it's a little bit wonky we can fix that by the way with some of these options up here but for now though we have one layer in the layers panel but what if we wanted to continue drawing along this line well we just go up to sculpt mode here and just toggle that on and just make sure that keep selected is also turned on and

basically keep selected will allow you to see this path that you've just drawn out with all the nodes so that you can go over to the last node that you drew out and just click and drag from there and we can keep drawing and it will continue that line so now it's just one layer still okay let's delete that and look at autoc close so autoc close will automatically close our curve so right now if I click and Drag out like this and it autoc closes on you can see there's a little red dot there

that's waiting for me to get close to it so I can go up and as I get closer little chain icon appears there that's telling me I can let go now it will connect them there we go now it's a closed curve if I didn't have autoc close checked I could do the same thing and now I will not see that chain link and I could just let go and they're not going to be linked together okay I will check autoc close again and I will just press delete and I'll also uncheck sculpt mode and

we'll just draw out that same shape that I tried to draw out and because I'm using just a trackpad and not a graphics tablet maybe my hand isn't very stable so it's a bit all over the place and there's lots of noes we can fix that with stabilizer mode so if I just check this one here and it's much like the pen tool same options once I've checked it I just choose which mode I want either rope mode or Window mode and I can set the length of the Rope so if I set the length

to let's say like 50 for now and I will try again so I'll click and drag and you can see there's a rope there and that's The length of it 50 pixels so I'll just drag this around and you see it's allowing me to draw a lot smoother curves and it looks a lot more Pleasant doesn't it if I wanted this rope length to be a lot longer I could try that so let me just delete these I can click and drag and you see I have a really long rope now and I can just

try it maybe this is better for if you're drawing on a really big canvas so there we go less nodes there all around very effective okay I'm going to delete that and Window mode exactly the same as the pen tool that we used this option on I'll just click over to that one and you see window instead of rope length and we can just click on that and drag it up and down so with this one it's basically like a rubber band so if I click and drag like this you see it chases Me So

the faster I go longer it gets and the slower I go the shorter it is and that's also helped me to create a very nice curve okay let me delete that and I will just uncheck everything so it's as it was before the next one I want to look at is controller and this is all about pressure sensitivity so obviously when I draw out like This the stroke thickness is the same from start to finish if I head to Velocity this one will make the line thickness thicker the faster you go and thinner the slower

you go so I'll just do a little example here so I'll just go along really slowly here and I'll just I'll draw a zed out I'll go quick down you see it's gone a little bit thicker and then thin here so that's velocity for you and I will delete everything there and we'll look at the next section so this one is pressure now if you've been watching from the start you probably would have seen me go into the stroke tab here and go down to pressure and there's this pressure graph so I'll leave this on

for now and try and do the same thing again remember I'm using a laptop with a trackpad now it is pressure sensitive this trackpad but let's see how we get on so I'll click and drag so if I press in really hard it will go to the full thickness of the stroke width and if if I ease up a little bit it goes much thinner and you can see I'm not doing a very good job here am I let me try that again you can see when I Let Go it kind of tries to smooth

it out a little bit but it hasn't really worked too Well in some scenarios like here is a little bit sharp isn't it it's kind of hard doing with your finger on a trackpad so I'll just try and do that again yeah it's very difficult on a trackpad but we can go over to the stroke tab here and I can show you the pressure sensitivity so this line that I've just drawn out this one here I can drag these points up and down and make further amendments to it but I'll just press reset for now

because I don't want that to appear next time I draw something okay I'm going to delete those just press on the Move tool and select both of them press delete now I go back to the pencil tool again and the pressure tool so this pressure option is much easier to use when using a graphics tablet so I have a wack on in front of me and I'm just going to switch over to that I'm not going to use stabiliz yet but let's see how we get on so I'll click and I'll ease up now and

then I'll go I'll press really hard and then I'll ease up and then I'll press really hard you can see that worked but it still looks pretty bad so this is where you would get the stabilizer option involved so I'll delete that I'll go up to stabilizer here And I'll keep it on rope mode for now and maybe I'll will drag that down a bit the length of it okay so we're using the graphics tablet and we're using rope mode stabilizer so I'll try again yeah much easier this way and in fact I will try

again but I'll increase the thickness of my stroke so I'll just whack that up and we'll try I'll go light to thick to light to thick to light to thick and that's me basically pressing very lightly as I'm drawing on the graphics tablet and then now I'm pressing really hard and now I'm easing up a little bit and now I'm pressing really hard so that works really well so if you are doing a lot of line work these Graphics tablets can help you a lot final thing whilst I'm still on the pencil tool if we

look at the ends you see it's round here and here is looking a bit sharp we can still go over to the pressure profile tab underneath the stroke tab here and we can play around with these so you see here if I drag this up and down it changes how this looks let me just show you there we go so I can drag it up and down and maybe I can get rid of this point I could just press delete on the keyboard so that's gone Into a nice smooth end there I'll just thicken that

up a bit and this end here I want to sort this out so this would be the right side of the graph I could just click on this node bring it down and maybe play around with this a little bit more there we go so everything looks a lot smoother now so that's the basics of the pencil tool if you want more examples go and check out my full in-depth tutorial okay moving on in this section we'll be covering the vector brush tool so like always go to the left hand side on the tool panel

select Vector brush tool right here or you can click B on the keyboard that's the shortcut and now we'll look up at the context toolbar of which options are available to us so first of all we need to choose our paint color so I will choose black for now I'll keep the width as it is and look there's opacity there and that's how transparent our brush will be when we start painting and there's some other options here but for now I've got my color and now I need to choose a kind of brush so head

on over near the layers panel and you'll see a tab called brushes click on it so we are under the acrylics section Which I believe is default to Affinity designer and I'm going to select one that I like acrylic stroke 12 looks good so I'll select that so now we have a paintbrush and black paint so what are the other options before we start drawing or painting well we've got the stabilizer just like before in the pencil tool it allow us to draw really smooth curves smooth lines by using either rope mode or Window mode

so it's on as default so I'm going to leave it there and then there's blend mode which I'll show you and then controller mode which just like the pencil tool we can change how it reacts in terms of pressure sensitivity but for now let's just start off with the basics and paint with our paintbrush so you can see as I drag it along we have a head of the paintbrush and a tail just like it is there that's how it's been designed what if we want to change color well from this point I could just

switch over and maybe I'll choose orange and I'll just click and drag again actually let me try that again so it's actually on the canvas there we go okay so we can choose the different colors as we're painting but what is this blend mode about well I'm going to show you Now so right now it's on normal and I'll just make the brush smaller by using that shortcut I showed you earlier the left bracket key or the right bracket key so I've made it smaller now I'm just going to zoom in here and I'm going

to click and drag this out right now there's no blend mode on but this will change how the paint stroke here is Blended with the background so I'm just going to click on it and click on lighten so I'll click and drag and you see as I go past this layer it's just the layer underneath I'll go to layers and show you it's on the bottom layer there so it it's lightened up because the blend mode is set to lighten I'll just try one more let's go for difference and I'll click and drag it across

and you can see that's how the difference blend mode has affected that okay so what makes this a vector brush let's have a look at that so I've painted it out but can I do anything to it afterwards well I can click on the Move tool and I can select this here I can still move it around and if you look at the layers panel each brush stroke I painted is on its own individual layer so if we head to the node tool I'll go ahead and click on that we Can see that we have

an open path there with these nodes and I can click and move them around like this so I can actually make changes after I've painted it out which is pretty cool and I have all of the handles as well just like with with the pen tool and the pencil tool but I want you to know at this point that this isn't actually a true Vector brush it's actually a raster image that's being stretched or repeated along a vector path so this actual brush stroke you're seeing here is actually made of a raster image so if

we zoom in it should stay completely sharp but as it's not a vector it's uh kind of pixelating a bit this is actually doing pretty well pretty smooth but it is a raster image and I'll go into that more in a bit so what else can we do with back to brushes well over here I have a couple of shapes drawn out just with the ellipse tool or the rectangle tool so with one of them selected I can go up to stroke here just like we did before and play around with the width but let's

say I wanted to make this a brush stroke this actual brush stroke here I want to apply that how do I do it well if you go up to style just above and you head right to the end there It says texture line style when I click on that this is going to enable me to apply a brush so I can go ahead and click on brushes and I can choose exactly the same brush so I'll click on that and you can see now it has applied it and we can go ahead to the ellipse

the circle and I can click on that and you can see it's done exactly the same thing so if you use the pencil tool or the pen tool you can apply brushes to them you don't just have to use this Vector brush tool to create things with the vector brushes if you know what I mean okay let's go ahead and look at the controller options so I'm going to click on the vector brush to tool again and up here it says controller pressure you can go through and choose the one you want you can choose

none if you want and then when you go ahead and draw let me just make the brush smaller so if I click and draw this along it's all the same width all the way along but if I click on pressure and you're using a graphics tablet or maybe the trackpad you can go ahead and click and drag along very lightly and then if you press in more it gets a lot thicker like that so if your pressure isn't Working you can go ahead and make these changes here now let me show you how these brushes

are made cuz I was talking about them not being kind of true Vector brushes so I'm going to go ahead and show you that so in the context toolbar you'll see there's a button called more if I click on that it will open up the brush defaults so this brush that we've got here these are the defaults of that and here you can change the brush width up down like this and you can see how it will react there you can change the size variance so this is important when you're using the controller how thick

and thin do you want it to go as you're applying pressure and also you've got the opacity variant so how transparent will it be and down below this is the thing I wanted to show you this is the image that makes the brush so if we look on the left hand side here we have the head of the brush here and that is the head there and then all the rest of it this lot here here is being stretched along the path so you can see here body is set to stretch if I just wanted

this little paintbrush here which is actually a raster image by the way if I wanted that to repeat I just press Repeat and you can see this is what it would do if I set it to repeat but it doesn't look great like that so let's leave it on stretch and also you'll see this Corners although this is getting a little bit more advanced I just want to show you so it makes sense to you if you're using the paintbrush on something that has these quite Sharp edges you can play around with how it handles

those sharp edges right now it's set to pull so it pulls along that corner but if you want it to overlap you can click that or fold over you can click that one so you can set the brush up how you want if you don't like anything that you've done and you would just want to go back to default settings just press reset down here and remember when we just used the controller we selected pressure at the top there this brush default is set to pressure for the size VAR okay so let me just close

this and I'll show you a couple more things so I'll go on the Move tool and I'll just select this brush here this is the one we used the controller pressure on if you want to continue playing around with the thin parts and the thick Parts more you can by using the width tool so head on over here to the Width tool stroke width tool you click on that and you can see this is where I tried to press quite lightly and then I tried to press really heavy and it got thicker so if I

slightly messed up I can click on this and I can drag it in and out just like that and also just so you know you can go over to the stroke Tab and you can see the actual pressure profile of it there and you can also play with it there okay let me delete all of this and I want to explain to you that there are some Vector brushes true Vector brushes that is so if I head along to the vector brush tool select it and I'll just keep it on orange for now I will

go ahead to my brushes and I will click on it and choose basic so these are all kind of preset Vector brushes that you can choose so let's say I go ahead and choose this one here solid brush with pressure so I'll just go ahead and draw out a line so I'll click it and press in a little bit it's got pressure on it and then let go there we go so I've got one line there so with this I can go ahead if I like this I can convert it to Curves cuz right now

it's a stroke so this is a true Vector brush because if I go up to layer expand stroke you Can see now I have a shape and it's got lots of nodes around it and if we go to the layers panel we can see it's now a curve and of course I can go ahead and change the color of that to whatever I want okay so now let's try the other way so I'll press on the vector brush tool again I'll choose a different brush let's go back to the one we were on before acrylics

and I will choose that same one again acrylic 12 I'll click and drag out there we go so now that I've got it selected I can go up to layer and I can press expand stroke nothing happens because this wasn't a vector to begin with it was a raster image okay one last thing when you've painted out your brush basically you don't have to keep that one you could just cycle through all the other brushes until you get to the one you like you can even go on a different pack like so here's one I

made and let me just get rid of the stroke color on this one so you can change it on the Fly just click around to all the different brushes until you get the one you want so some brushes are made to work on an open curve like the top one here and some are made to work on a closed curve like a circle they're just different brushes So if I clicked on this one here this is not made to go around in a circle and continue to link but this one is okay let's move on

in this section we're going to be covering the shape Builder tool now just to note I have made an in-depth tutorial of this with many examples so you can go and check that out but here I'm just going to be showing you the basics so you can get started basically so in order to use this tool we need to make a couple of selections so we have two shapes here a triangle and a circle I'm going to select these two once I've selected them I need to select the shape Builder tool shortcut is s on

the keyboard so I'm going to select it what's the first thing that we notice both shapes now have this kind of faint blue outline around around them and as I hover over each section it's kind of highlighting them if we go up to the context toolbar we can see a few options we have the first one is action and if I hover over the plus button it says create a new shape from the selected areas and remove used areas from original objects so basically it wants us to make a selection but first of all I'll

just cycle through the other ones I will just Say about these actions they're very similar to the Boolean operations that I've shown you before so this one the plus wants me to add shapes together if I go over to Boolean operations you can see add it's basically the same thing as that it's just a different way of doing it and the minus button over here under action so delete selected areas from object just like the booing operation subtract and the last one we've got here is create a new shape from selected areas so instead of

us adding or deleting from these current objects it's going to create a new one based on our selections so let's talk about how we select well there's a few different ways the first one being you could just click once on the object that you want make another selection over here I'll just click once again and I can select that one so now they're all selected that's one way of doing it if you don't want that you could just simply click again to deselect or all of them you just press escape on the keyboard up here

it says trag method and freehand so that's the one it's on right now we can also click and drag around to make our selection I'll press escape the next One is line so this one is click and and drag out basically just one line so I could skip over that one and go to there that's another method I'll press escape and I'll go to Marquee and basically this is the old school sort of click and drag a selection box and make your selection but for now let's just stick to freeh hand there are a couple

of other options here clean up internal curves connected curves unused curves and use style from first selected areas but this is covered in the more in-depth tutorial so go and check that out but for now let's make our selection and we will use the action plus okay so I'm going to click on this and I'm going to drag across to all of them so all of them are selected right now I can go ahead and click on the plus so I've clicked on the plus and it's turned into one big shape and if I click

on the Move tool I can move it around the original one is no longer there so why did it turn into a black outline well if you look over here on my colors tab I kind of had it on no fill and stroke to Black what if I didn't want that well let's go back and step I'll press command Zed to go back and I'll press on S the shape Builder Tool this last box here says use style from first selected area so I've check that and now I will make this selection so click and

drag and I'll let go and then I'll go up to action and I'll press plus and now you can see the first one was orange and now the whole thing is orange if I click on the Move tool you can see the original object is gone it's now just one object I will just quickly cover this once you get faster at using this tool I'll press command Zed a couple of times go back on the the shape Builder tool so before we were making our selection like that weren't we and then going up and pressing

the action button but instead you can go up to the action button you can highlight it now when you make your selection and you let go it will automatically perform that action so let's move on to the other shape and we'll go through the rest of the options so I've highlighted them I've pressed s for the shape Builder tool I'm going to head on up to action and just uncheck that so this one minus we're subtracting parts of it so let's say we just wanted to subtract the middle section here I've selected it and I'll

go up to minus and I'll press It and now the middle is no longer there anymore I could also keep doing it so I could select that and click on the minus again and it will get rid of that okay the last option let's try it out on this one so again I will highlight it I'll press s on the keyboard for the shape Builder tool and I'll head on up to create a new shape from the selected areas so I'm just going to do that and I'll do it to the whole thing so remember

it said it's going to create a new shape so I'm going to go ahead and click on it so you can see it's all gone orange now if I press the move tool and I just select this layer I can pull it away and we see I have my original design underneath and that's great so I can still continue to keep making different versions of this if I want so that's the basics of the shape Builder tool there's one more option I want to show you this is one of the reasons I use this tool

quite a lot and much like the Boolean operations example I showed you earlier I'm going to do the same thing on this so I've highlighted them all and note this time it's just a black stroke with no fill so I'll press on S the shape Builder tool what my goal Is here is to basically cut into this circle this big triangle here first thing I'm going to do I'm going to go ahead and select this portion here and this portion here and I'm going to click on minus cuz I want to get rid of it

okay that's done but I can see that it's kind of cut into this section here so I'm going to select this portion here so that make it all one and then I can go up to the action and press plus and now when I press on V the move tool they are still individual objects but it's done exactly what I wanted it to do go ahead and check the full tutorial for many more examples in this section we're going to be covering the vector flood fill tool now much like older programs you could just use

a paint bucket click once inside of a shape and it would fill it with color this is kind of similar but it's quite confusing so I'm just going to try and break down the basics so you can make use of it now the vector floodfill tool will react different ly depending on the shape you are going to flood so we have just outlines here we're going to start off with that and then move forward so I have one shape selected I'm going to go ahead and go over To the tools panel and select the vector

flood fill tool the shortcut for this one is R I'm going to go ahead and select it and before I do anything else I did read in a few forums that people didn't have it there and they were wondering why it was missing if yours is missing just simply head on up to view head all the way down to customize tools click click on that and then there you'll see the icon you could just click on it and drag it into your tools panel okay as always we'll go up to the context toolbar and look

at some of the options now it may seem like very few options but actually it can get quite confusing so just to begin with we're going to leave it on the default settings okay so with the default settings on go ahead and select a color and I'll just select some kind of blue color there and then I'll just head on over to the shape I've selected and I'll just press once so now that I've pressed that I'll just press on the Move tool and we can see in the layers panel we have the outline ellipse

here that's our original shape and underneath we have this circle and this circle has a fill that we just chose of course so basically we're left with two Layers the original one outline and the new fill layer okay let's go ahead and select two so I will click and select these two remaining circles here now I'm going to go back to the vector flood fill tool this time I'll just press on the shortcut r on the keyboard it can be handy to use this if you want to quickly fill multiple items maybe with different colors

so I could just go over here and make it purple and click I'll choose a different color and click and as you can see in the layers panel it's starting to look a little bit messy now but basically we have three outlines here and I'll move them all around and we have three fills that have been added okay let's try the vector flood fill tool with three shapes that are overlapping each other these all just have outlines so let's go ahead and make our selection so I'll click and drag it over these three and then

I'll go ahead and click on the vector flood fill tool and leaving the settings as they are on default I'm just going to go ahead and hover over these and I just want you to note actually just like the shape Builder tool it's kind of allowing us a selection you can see as I hover over each Area gets highlighted so what we can do in this scenario let's say if we just wanted to fill this area in here I could just choose a color here in the color Tab and then just click once there and

then I could click once again there what we're left with is just the shapes of wherever these circles overlap so in the layers panel I'll just select these two this is what we're left with and these all arrived underneath our three circles here using the same shapes I'm going to try it a different way so I'm going to go ahead and select them all again and then I'm going to click on R for the vector flood fill tool and before we were just clicking once when we we clicked once there and we clicked once once

there this time I'm going to click and hold my finger down and I'm just going to drag it along like this and I'm still using all the same default settings I'm going to let go and we're going to see what we've been left with so I'll press on V the move tool and I'll go ahead to the layers panel and look what we've got so I'll choose all of those outlines just drag them up there and underneath we can see what we're left with it's just one single shape so it works Very similar to the

shape Builder tool and notice that this shape is underneath on the layer layer stack okay here's another example of what the vector flood fill tool can do so I have two layers one of them is just an open curve just one stroke there and the other one is our trusty Circle so with this one I'm just going to highlight them all again so all shapes selected I'm going to go ahead and press r on the keyboard for the vector flood fill tool and I'm still going to leave all the same settings as they are so

this line watch what this does for us so just because it's laid over this circle I can go ahead and hover over both sides if I just click once we'll see what's happened I'll press V on the Move tool and what we can see is these two layers were left on top in the layer stack and this layer underneath has been filled and is underneath in the layer stack so this line here just acted like a knife so let me illustrate what will happen if you start off with a solid fill like this no outline

just a solid fill so I'll go ahead and select the first one press r on the keyboard and leaving the settings as they are default I'll choose my color which I've done already and I'll just click once as you you can see in the layers panel we still only have two shapes so basically it is just swapped over the blue with the orange okay so we have these two circles both of them have solid fills in them so what happens if we overlap these shapes and then go and use the vector flood fill tool well

I've got them both selected I'm going to press R for the vector flood fill tool and I will just note at this point this is where it gets confusing because when you first start using this tool you might just want to put two shapes together that both have fills and you'll be uh maybe confused about the results but after this after I show you this confusing bit I'll show you a clearer example of what it's doing so right now I can head on up to the insertion mode up here in the context toolbar I'm just

going to tell you what they are so this one says inside this is what it is as default and the second one is in between okay so we'll leave it on its default settings so I'll go down and I'll just select this middle one here and I've chosen a purple color okay so I'm just going to click once and let's see what's happened so I'll Click the move tool and you can see in the layers panel we have this blue circle and I'll just move it out this blue circle now has that purple in it

but the purple only appears where the shape intersected it and if we look in the layers panel there's a little drop- down arrow there we can click on that and we can see that this shape here has been clipped inside of the blue circle and if you recall when I was talking about the layers panel I showed you clipping and masking so this is basically what that has done and it might be a bit confusing let me go back command Zed and we'll choose a different option so both of them selected again I'll press r

on the keyboard I'll go up to insertion mode and click on in between I'll click on that and I'll do the exactly the same thing with the same color I click once if I look in the layers panel you can see now we have three shapes nothing has been clipped inside of anything and actually that shape that we just created is is not in between anything so it's confusing right okay let's move on to make it clearer okay so we have a new shape and it's just a circle and then just one open curve one

stroke just one line and it's Overlaying the circle I will highlight all of them and I'll press r on the keyboard we're going to go up to insertion mode and we're going to click on inside and now we're going to choose a color so I will choose some orangey yellow color so I want you to pay attention to the layers panel we just have two layers there the circle and the line and we've chosen our color we're in the vector flood fill tool and we're going to highlight and flood the bottom half so I will

click once and remember we chose insertion mode inside so I'll press on V the move tool and we'll go and have a look at the results so you can see we still have our line here so I'll pull that off and then we have our Circle and inside of that is clipped our new flooded area so the insertion mode said it would place it inside and that's what it's done it's basically placed it inside of the blue circle so the blue circle has become a parent layer and the orange half circle has become a child

layer okay let's try that again but with the in between insertion mode so I've got the shape selected I'll press r on the keyboard I'll go up to insertion mode and click on in between and I'll use the same color And I'll just highlight the same color as well I'll flood that section keep your eye on the layers panel again I'll click once and now you can see if I click on the Move tool we have the top layer is our line the middle layer so in between is where we've just flooded and the bottom

layer is our base layer our fill so all three different layers here like that but they're kind of stacked on each other like this that's in between so using exactly the same example again I'm going to highlight them press r on the keyboard to enter the vector flood fill tool we'll leave insertion mode on in between and I just want to show you the fill modes so you can see here fill mode it says add on top so this one is smart refill and this one is knockout so these fill modes are I think more

useful when you're using layers with gradients with some transparency in there or maybe a PNG that has transparent properties but for now I'm just going to show you knockout and how it can help us here just with these same shapes so I'm going to go ahead and select the same color again and I will just click on here you can see that uh my Vector flood fill tool icon is not there Anymore but I'll just click once and let's look at the results so we're left with quite a few layers here basically on top we

have our single line and we have in between the original shape so this is our original shape in between that is our flooded area so I can pull them apart now and just like the layer stack I'll order them this is basically what we're left with so the line has Act Like a Knife again and it split the original layer so it's kind of knocked out the rest of the blue so that's knockout and also you'll probably notice that there's one layer underneath here that there is no fill no nothing that has been left over

as well so I can just delete that okay let's use the vector flood fill tool to apply a bit map so what is a bit map is basically like a JPEG or a PNG the PNG can have some transparent properties as well so I'll select the first one which is the circle and we'll press r on the keyboard and now we'll look at the insertion mode we'll just keep it on inside and fill mode we'll keep it on Smart refill and over here this little photo image here when we click on this we can choose

on our file system on our computer where this jpeg or PNG is but before We do that let's just apply a fit mode right now it's set to none and then there's Max fit minimum fit so I'll just choose minimum fit for now and this is how that picture will fit inside of here so I'm going to click on this and then I'm going to go to my desktop and just choose this one here it says dots I will click on open and nothing has happened well that's because we've just chosen the bit map image

but we have to apply it so I can go ahead with the vector flood field tool and just click once and as you can see I have this PNG that I've uploaded and wherever it's blue that was transparent and wherever it's black that was just black so I can click on these arrows here and drag it inwards I can hold shift to keep it steady and you see you can just apply this bit map image inside okay let's try that again but this time I want to apply it to this rectangle here and I'm going

to choose a different fit mode so again I'm going to press R and I'm going to press stretch this time as well and then as it's still selected in my color palette as you see there The Fill is still there I will just click once and you can see it's stretched to fit this rectangle and it Doesn't look great does it so we can drag this in and oh no we still can't fix the aspect ratio so what do we do well we can hold down control on the keyboard click once and drag in and

you see there's like a little line there if I go to there it snaps into place and now the aspect ratio is back to normal okay that's that okay now I'm going to show you how to use a vector flood fill tool to flood a shape with not just solid fills but fills with transparency so let's say like a yellow that has 50% transparency or maybe a gradient that goes from pink to completely transparent so let's get started I have my shape selected I'm going to click on the vector flood fill tool insertion mode doesn't

really matter at this point the fill modes matter at this point so the first one says add on top we'll just get started with that but before I do that I need to select a gradient so that's what we're going to be doing so I'm going to head on over to swatches over here and I'm just going to click and show you the Affinity gradients so here it says you have black to transparent white to transparent these are like presets that are already made but I've made some that will be a bit More obvious so

here I've got pink to transparent I'm going to select that one now I'm going to go ahead and just click once on our Circle to flood it so I've clicked and what do we see we see a line here and this is basically kind of like our gradient tool where I can just click and drag it and move it around wherever I want okay so let's look at the layers panel where is this extra layer how can we manage this gradient well when you apply a layer with transparency it's all controlled in the appearance panel

so up here next to watches I'm going to click on the appearance panel and we can see the blue circle here this is our base shape that's that's the fill for that one and then just above it this is the gradient that we applied so I want you to take note as we're in the fill mood plus add on top it has added on top in the appearance panel and what this mode will allow you to do is add multiple of the same layers even if it's the same color so I'm just going to go

ahead and click it once more so I'll click once again and you can see we have two of the same fill layers here same color everything like that the plus fill mode will allow you to do that just add Multiple of the same ones of course you can go to swatches and I have another example here orange to transparent I can click on that and I can click add again if we go to appearance panel we can see we have that new one and we have two of the same fills there okay so what I'm

going to do now is I'm going to go back a few steps I'm going to press command Zed until we have no fill again okay and this time we're going to go ahead and click on Smart refill so once I've got that selected I can go ahead and choose my gradient so let's choose the first one again this pink to transparent and then I'm going to go ahead and click apply same thing happened again let's go up to appearance and we can see this new fill layer is there if however I press again it will

not let me add the same fill twice I have to make a different color for it to work so I can go to my swatches again I can choose that orangey one click on that and go back to the appearance panel and now I can just click on this once more so it's allowed me to add two different fills but different colors if I click once more it will not allow me to do it so smart refill cancels out duplications okay let's Go up here to knockout this is the last fill mode if I click

on that what do you think it will do knock it out so remember I'm still in this one here the orange gradient I go up to appearance and I'll just click once it has completely knocked out everything that I've done before even the base shape so now all we're left with is a gradient from yellow to transparent and nothing else so that's those three modes there for you and I'll just add on to the end here okay of course we've used the vector flood fill tool to click and add our different gradients Etc but let's

say you go back to the move tool you're back in color and you just click away from it if you click back on it how do you control it well we know that we can go to the appearance panel and see what's inside what if we wanted to control this gradient and change the direction of it well you simply go over to the gradient tool here and you just select that and see this line has appeared again and we can start playing around with that also to note on top of that you don't have to

use the vector flood fill tool again from here you could simply just go to add fill here in the appearance panel So I just click on that and we've added another one I can click on it and then I can choose the gradient that I want let's say blue blue to green okay so I've added that in there now so now I have two I could drag this on top if I want and start playing around with that and you see it's all getting a little bit confusing but just so you know you can do

that if you wanted to delete just one of these fills look there's a little bin in the corner so you can just click on that okay the last section of the vector flood fill tool is fill to visible boundaries that's the last option that we haven't chosen so I'm going to select these two shapes here and I'm going to go ahead and click on the vector flood fill tool and I'm going to head up I'll just leave it on in between and smart refill doesn't really matter at this point this is the thing we're looking

at options it says fill two visible boundaries now I'm not going to select it yet because I want you to have a look and understand what we're looking at here so without that on when I hover over with the vector flood fill tool you can see the different Target layers the different shapes it's telling me are This part of the triangle this little pointy bit of the triangle and the rest of the circle okay if we head on up to build to visible boundaries and click on it now now let's see how it reacts so

the visible shape right now because it's on top is the triangle so as I hover over this section you see it's not paying any attention to this intersecting line because it's not visible the circle is underneath in the layer stack and when I go over to the circle the visible boundaries that you can see because it's underneath the triangle is just this Pac-Man shape here so let's go ahead and uncheck it for now fill the visible boundaries is off so I'm going to select this right portion I'll click once with my blue paint and see

what it's done it's basically filled it up to this line and made a new shape that's what it happens there let's go back a step now I'm going to press on the options fill to visible boundaries so as I go down I'm going to click yes it just filled it to the visible boundaries that it could see I'll press command Zed and we'll try it on the circle the only thing you can see here because it's underneath the triangle is the Pacman so if I click on it what's it done it's created a new shape

of a blue Pac-Man so that's the difference between fill two visible boundaries on versus off okay in this section it's time for us to start placing text on the canvas we can use the artistic text tool to begin with so in the tools panel over there you can click on it or you can press t on the keyboard that's the shortcut when I click on it and I long press you'll see there's another option underneath called frame text tool basically think of it like this artistic text tool is for the big headlines and maybe you've

got a paragraph underneath that's where you'd use the frame text tool basically anything more than a couple of sentences so artistic text tool let's begin now that I have it selected you look up in the context toolbar all of these options will help us to format our text in some way so there's a couple of ways to get started okay you could just click on the page anywhere just click once and you see I'm ready to start typing now all of these settings that are currently active in the context toolbar will apply to this like

so 150 pixels font size blue color for the font aerial for the font Family so I will just start typing a b c little C there so that's one way of laying it down another way is to just click and drag and this way I get to see the font size like right next to it you see there the dimensions and when I'm happy with it I can just let go and now I can start typing artistic there we go so what can we do from this point well let me head on over to the

move tool I can grab it and place it wherever I want I can go up to the alignment Tab and I can just Center it on the document there and press apply I can rotate it and by the way lots of these changes that we can make here uh apply to all the shapes that we've used before so in a shape you also get this handle you can do this you can squash it down you can skew it like this and you can resize it like this and obviously this is changing the font size as

you can see above it's changing okay let's look through some of the options in the context toolbar so the whole thing is selected right now and I want it to apply to the whole thing but if if I just wanted it to apply to a couple of letters I could just highlight them like this and then go up there and Make the changes but for now I want it to apply to all of them so I'm just going to press on the Move tool and head on up so over here of course is our font

family if I click on this over on the left hand side it says all that's all the fonts that are available on your system your computer and then we've got recent these might be fonts that you might have used quite recently when using Affinity designer and then you've got used which is the fonts used on your actual document so let's say you've got maybe three different fonts on the go it will show three fonts here and then you've got favorites so whilst I'm still in recents I want to show you if you head on over

to the right hand side you can see there's a little heart next to it if you press this heart that font would then go in your favorites so you don't have to go scrolling through hundreds of fonts but we'll leave it on aerial for now and right next to it is font style and of course italic regular bold italic bold I'll click on Bold so all the usual settings that you might know about already and we've got font size of course we know about that you could just cycle through it going Up and down like

this or you could just enter the amount yourself maybe 200 you'd write there let's make it 250 actually and of course you've got bold italic underline all of those things that could just be toggled on and off very quick and easy of course you've got color as well so you can choose whichever color you want and you can add a gradient but I'll show you how to use that in a bit with the gradient tool cuz it's much easier and of course you've got all of these other options here but one of the most important

ones is aligning so let's say right now it doesn't really matter which one I press because I've only got one word there but if I just click on the end there I just double tap you see I'm ready to start typing again let's say I press return and I start typing in text so now it becomes apparent that this is all aligned to the left this text word is not in the center so I can head on up to align and press align to Center there and also you can just highlight individual words in there

and go ahead and change the fonts size so maybe I want it to be about this big and I can change this font color as well like this but I will say that I really don't Like playing around with two words in kind of one text box I prefer to just press command Zed I'll go back yeah so I I prefer to just copy and paste like this I'm just going to hold down command as I'm dragging that off and then I can make the changes to this so maybe I just write text here and

then I've it's a little bit faster for me to kind of move around and place wherever I want if however I did have text written underneath there and let's say I pressed off and I pressed on again when I change the color of this it's going to change the color of all of them and I'd have to actually go in and select that one and then change the color of it I'd rather work separately so I've got two different layers here and what else can I do to them well we can stylize them somewhat we

can head on over to the stroke tab over here and start applying a stroke so I'll just click and drag that up and then we can go and change change the color of that by going to the color tab clicking on the stroke color and then maybe we'll make it orange and make it a little bit thicker so I'll go back to stroke and whack that up so you can play around with the stroke width Etc let me Zoom into that and remember you can play around with the order of your stroke and you know

just play around with the different alignment options that you have there until you get the one you want obviously right now you can see it's kind of rounded on the corners there you can click on the sharp one over there the miter join or the flat one up to you get creative but I'll just whack that down a little bit so it looks better so what else can I do can I use a gradient yeah sure you can use a gradient um for now though I'll just get rid of that stroke so it's more obvious

okay let's apply a gradient so we just head on over to the left hand side and you see it says gradient tool there I can click on it and just drag it like this and I can choose the different colors I want from it so I could just go up here for the left side I'll choose like purple purple and for the right side I'll choose a lighter blue something like that there we go back to the move tool so I've applied a gradient easy enough anytime I want to make a change to it I

can press G on the keyboard to get to the gradient tool again and then make my changes so one of the things that you'll use quite Often if you work with text is just like kerning so there is an actual extra panel for this and I'll show you where that is but a short way and quick way to do it is just to you see these two the r and the T are quite close together if I just double click in here and I'm ready to start typing again now I can just hold option on

the keyboard and just click on the right arrow or left Arrow just to space it a little bit more evenly and then I can use the right arrow key to kind of shuffle along and maybe make some more changes to the spacing between these letters so this is another quick way of doing it but if you really want more options you can go ahead and reveal different panels so there's quite a few that are hidden right now so if I go up to window and then I go down to text see all of these These

are different popup boxes or panels that we can choose so I will just choose character for now because this one's quite useful and you see when I've clicked it it will pop up there if I want I can actually drag it into my studio down here and like dock it you see like where it's light blue there or I can dock it up here but I'll just keep it next to the text For now so with this one of course we have even more options and you see down here we have the cing set to

Auto right now type in the values you want you've got tracking and Baseline and all these other ones that you might be used to if you're used to working with text but just so you know these are here and you can dock them in your studio wherever you want or you could just simply click on the X and get rid of them once you're done with it okay another thing is you can actually convert this to Curves so obviously I've applied a gradient to it and by the way you can still keep typing and the

gradient will be there so I can just type in gradient oh things are getting big now aren't they so let me zoom out a bit and just resize that so you can see I'm still typing and the gradient is still revealed let's say I'm happy with what I've done here and I actually just want to convert it to Curves because maybe I want to make some additional adjustments like maybe making a really long t or something well I can just right click on it and I can go down and press convert to Curves right here

or I can just hold down command and press return and If you look in the layers panel now I'll just get rid of this extra text so it doesn't get in the way so if we look in the layers panel if I open this drop- down arrow you can see all of the different letters are individually in a line here this is good if you if you want to maybe you just want to make this one slightly bigger and maybe you want to head on to the node tool and maybe like squeeze these in by

the way I have no idea what I'm doing right now just uh showing you you can change a few things I'm deleting a few nodes there maybe that Big T like I was talking about I could just select those nodes bring it up like that and maybe I will just select those two nodes and bring it out like here so there we go you can do things like this and maybe you don't want this big group anymore in the layers panel um well you could just literally select all of them like this and then you

can go up to Boolean operations and you can just click add so now I can just drag it out of that group delete that empty group and now I have just one layer with all of these I can continue to playing around with my gradient tool and get creative whilst we're still on the Subject of the artistic text tool I know a lot of people when you first start maybe you want to curve text around a shape maybe like a circle well I'm going to cover that just so you know how to do it so

you can head on over to the left hand side and grab your ellipse click on that and just click and drag out like this okay let's say you want to type around this circle here well you can head on over to the artistic text tool just select that and now with that you can just head on over and in fact I should probably change the color of this cuz we're not seeing everything maybe I'll make it this color okay I'll click on the artistic text tool again and you see as I come close there's a

little T there and that means that it's ready for me to lay down my text so I can click and you see I've got really big text there so I'm just going to make that smaller maybe I'll make it like 30 pixels and from this point I can start typing so I'll write the same thing again I'll do it all in capitals this time artistic yeah I'll just call it artistic for now okay so from this point you can see that on the left and on the right there's these two little triangles what are they

well Basically they are allowing you to drag and kind of place into the center here and I can grab this one here and drag that so now with both of these being kind of snapped into place I know that that is centered up there and I can keep typing as well right now it's set to align to Center so every time I type now it should always be centered so I could type in text tool so at this point you could play around with the Baseline grid so head on up to the context toolbar click

on that and then you could just drag this up and down maybe you want it to be kind of centered on that Circle Line there so that's one thing you can do also I should probably show you that if you go back on the Move tool and you click and rescale it will actually rescale with the circle so you see what's happening here and if you go even lower you see oh look I've got another line here or if you want to rescale and you don't want it to do that you can click on you

see this little circle here you just click on that and you can resize down and it won't affect the text at all but going back to that other piece of text you saw another one underneath didn't you well if we head on up if I just double Tap that let me zoom in if I press return now it will go to the bottom half so I can type something else again Affinity designer okay great doesn't look very centered does it well I could just grab this Little Triangle here place it up here it kind of

snaps into place and I can head over here and there's green one just kind of hiding actually I almost missed that slightly darker green so now that I know that's centered and I can go to the Baseline grid let's say for this lot here I could just click and select I can go to Baseline grid click and drag out a little bit like that and of course from this point you can do whatever you want but you can grab the ellipse tool again and just click and drag out maybe you want a circle here and

maybe a picture photo or something like that but basically that's how to type around a circle and that can work with the pen tool as well so you could just click with the pen tool make some kind of shape like that and then you could go up to the artistic textt tool again sorry and then just click and start typing and then you can go on the Node tool and you can start playing around with the node and maybe to fine-tune it to Your liking so that's the artistic text tool in this section we be

covering the basics of the frame text tool so imagine you have a title already laid down on your document and now you want to add some paragraphs underneath well you'll head on over to the tools panel and you will long press on the artistic text tool and you'll reveal frame text tool so I'm going to select that and one of the first things you'll notice is that the cursor is different it's got a t there that's for frame text and up there in the context toolbar we have pretty much exactly the same options that we

had for the artistic text tool so font type font size color let's change that to a black color and you know you've got alignment options but none of that matters just yet let's just go ahead and create a frame for our text so I will just click and drag out a box like this so now that I've let go you can see in the layers panel it says frame text that's our new layer and from in here I could start typing or I'll just paste in some text that I got from the internet so what's

going on here then well we have a frame and it seems like the text isn't properly fitting in there well we Can play around with this box and manipulate it to work for us so on the side there I can click and drag and you can see it reshuffles to adapt to the box but if I didn't let's say I've had it like this you can see there's a little red eye there well that's because the frame doesn't fit the text so I can drag the frame down and make the ey happy now it's gone

away you can also drag it up like this and if you want to ignore that there's actually hidden t text you can click on that and it will tell you there is more text here just so you know so I'll just uncheck that and bring it down maybe I'll resize it so looks a little bit better so what else can I do well you know just like the shapes that I showed you earlier you can rotate it you can hold down shift to go into 15° increments you can K it as well let me try

and K it there we go you can do this I'll press command Zed to go back and one of the important things is of course you can highlight all the text and change the font size but what I like to do is just see this little handle just down here if I click on that I can resize the frame and it resizes the text at the same time so that's really neat Remember that one of course you can go ahead and play around with the different alignment options there's aligned left I can click on this

one here Justified left but I'll just keep it on the center one for now the middle align to middle I can go ahead and change the color maybe I want this to be a little bit blue that's fine also I can go ahead and add a gradient to it I like to use the gradient tool for this so I can go over here or press G on the keyboard and you see all the text is kind of highlighted here I could just click and drag down like this and then I can choose my different colors

so the bottom one I'll maybe choose like purple and the top one I'll choose like light blue which is already and I just press the move tool and there we go we've applied a gradient to it if you are setting up a box and you don't actually have text to put in and you just kind of want it to be there as a placeholder you can go ahead and do that so I'll click on the frame text tool again I'll click and drag out like this and then I can go up to text and then

insert fill a text and you see it's just build it up with some text so another cool thing you Can do is Place text inside of a shape so what you do first is let's say let's grab a triangle and I will click and drag that out yeah somewh like that would work so I can let go and from this point I just right click and I'll just scroll down until I can see convert to text frame and you could use this with any shape or you can even draw your own shapes as well so

I've clicked on that and you see look it's ready for the text again so I'll just press command V to paste that in and now I will start playing around with this text box to make it work a bit better for me there we go so we have a triangle there and it already has all of those gradients applied and the colors Etc so that's a really cool way of doing it I'll delete that and just show you how you can just just create your own shape so I'll use that triangle again just up here

but I'll also use let's say a rectangle as well and I'll just kind of place it around there I'm not thinking too much about this I will add them together with the Boolean operations by the way you can use the pen tool as well just to draw a random blob and now that I've done that right click and go down to convert to text frame and I Can press command V again and that's just going to paste in the text that I've already got and I can see it's not really working so well right now

so I'm going to change the font size in fact I have to select all of it so just select anywhere hold command a and that selects all of the text and then you can go up to the size and you can just cycle through to one that kind of works for you that will do I know it doesn't look great right now you could actually go in and just highlight let's say Affinity designer maybe I'll do it one word at a time I can go in there and make that one bold maybe make it a

little bit bigger and I can do the same thing with designer as well bold let's make it slightly bigger and you can do this and even like change the color of that as well darker blue or this color that will do so you can see the frame text tool is very flexible and useful to use when you're using text if you want to go even further and you want more options get Affinity publisher it's really good in this section we'll be covering the effects Tab and basically this will allow you to apply effects to text

or shapes whatever design you have in an Instant so I'm going to start off with this simple circular shape here and what I'm going to do is head on down underneath the layers tab there's something called layer effects I'm going to click on that and you see this popup box has appeared and there's many different options here but we'll start off with a simple one that's probably used quite often and that is outer Shadow so I can just go ahead and click on that and you see it's applied a shadow to it and we've got

all these options that relate to it so I can play around with the opacity of this I can click on the radius you see it blurs it a little bit so it will keep it kind of Midway and I can click on offset as well so if I click on offset it basically drags it inwards and so it's kind of directly behind if I drag it this way it's like there's a light source on the top left and it's shining down and casting this Shadow I can also change the direction of that said Light Source

by playing around with angle down here so I can just click on that and I can change the direction of it alternatively if you're more Hands-On you can click on the offset tool just click on that and then you Can actually grab that shadow and play around with it yourself and of course you can change the color of the Shadow but I'm just going to leave it as it is for now and also the intensity which I think I've just shown you but there we go there's intensity so that's one effect so one important thing

I want to show you is this thing here scale with object by default it's usually off so let's just leave it as it is and we'll press close now if I scale this object down you'll see that the effect is looking completely different so if you're designing something small and let's say you want to make it bigger you want the effect to remain the same so what I can do head on over to my layers Tab and you see on the layer that I have the effect applied to it now has an fx icon I

can just click on that and the popup box reappears so now let's try clicking on scale with object and I'll press close we'll try again so as I scale down you can see it's exactly the same as it was when it was at it big size okay great okay one last thing on this actually I can overlay it there's a shape underneath and I can go back into the effects tab again and you can play Around with the blend mode this blend mode will affect whichever effect you've got so I've got a shadow here I

can click on multiply and go down to average let's say click on that and you'll see it changes based on the layer underneath but for now I'll just place it on normal okay and I'll press close another really important thing especially that will save you time is the ability to be able to duplicate this effect onto different layers so in the layers tab we have this purple circle and then we've got this triangle underneath this blue one if I want to copy the effect from this to this I simply go over to the layers tab

click on that FX icon click and drag it down and let go and now you can see it's applied it to the triangle shape okay let's apply a layer effect to this text here the text is still typable by the way way I have it selected I'm going to click on layer effects and the popup box will appear I'll just resize this so you see what's going to happen here I'm not going to show you all of the inner Shadow outer Shadow Inner Glow outer glow because they handle the same way as the outer Shadow

so what I'm going to do here is to show you Bevel and emboss and You see when I click on it it's already showing me the result but there's four different types so there's pillow there's emboss there's outer and there's also inner as well so let's have a play around with some of these settings I'll just zoom in a little bit so you can see better so we can play around with the radius and you can kind of see what's happening here and also I can soften this and also I can change the direction of

the light so it says inner it's kind of like these letters are sunk into something so I can drag this down further so I can see more of the Shadow so imagine the sun's coming from this way and it's creating these shadows and then the highlights are affecting this part here I can bring down the radius more to change effect of it and bring down the softness too so you can have a good play around with that also if you didn't like the highlight color or the shadow color you can go ahead and click on

these and remember there's blend modes applied as well so if you didn't want a black one you could have let's say a purple one but right now it's not really showing is it it's cuz the blend mode is on multiply if I Just chucked it on normal you'd start to see it and I'll bring it out slightly more and you can see this purple start coming through a little bit and you can play around with it until you get the effect that you want I'm just going to go back a couple of steps command Zed

command Zed and there we go back to around about here and I want to show you there's profiles these are pressure profiles and there's a few presets here so if I clicked on that one it would make it look more like it has a bevel and if I click on this one you can kind of see what's going on if you look at the letters it kind of it's flat and then it curves up and then it curves around and this is this shape here isn't it and you could just cycle through those whichever one

You' like or you can actually play around with them yourself to make those changes so that's bevel and emboss and of course you have other ones as well like you can combine these two so you have outline here let's say we wanted to add an outline onto this I can click on that and I can bring up the radius and I can change the color of it as well maybe something like that maybe a bit lighter and I can align it to the Inside the center the outside anything you want here and then the fill

style is it solid color is it a contour is it a gradient you decide so you can get creative and combine all of them if you no longer want any of them you just simply uncheck them and you just press close and you're back to normal again okay now I just want to show you how you can create a kind of bowl effect and I I made a tutorial on this like years ago but I'll just choose some kind of blue color like that and I'll go down to layer effects and this time we'll click

on 3D and I'll bring the radius up like this and you can see it's starting to look three-dimensional but the important thing here is the pressure profile so if I click on that I will choose one of these to begin with yeah I'll choose this one here as a starting point just like that last example I showed you and then I can start playing around with the look of it so let's say we want yeah we want this bit to be kind of flat down there and we want this to come up like this and

you can see this is kind of like looking at a plate from above or a bowl and you can go ahead And change the direction C of the light here you can get really creative and start adding in your own little nodes in here have a good play around with this uh all of these other options here like diffuse Etc it's all about lighting like specular shininess so get creative and don't set limits for yourself okay so that's the layer effects let's move on in this section we're going to be covering the style picker tool

and this tool will enable you to basically copy layer effects and styles fill colors and apply it to other objects this works on shapes text Etc so the first thing we have to do is select the target layer this is the layer that we want all the styles to go onto and the next thing we have to do is go on over to the tools panel and we will click on style picker tool now that I've selected it you can see the cursor has changed and it looks a bit like the Color Picker tool but

this one is the style picker and we can see in the context toolbar we have all of these options stroke fill layer opacity they're all checked right now so this style picker if I was to go over to this orange FX and click on it it would copy all of these things and then I could Apply that to anything I want but I don't want to apply everything let's say on this one to start off with the basics I just want to copy over this stroke so what I'm going to do I could uncheck all

of these but I could just be quick and select none okay now I'm just going to select stroke cuz that's the only one I want to copy over and I will just click once on it and you can see is transferred across just the stroke and notice that the style picker looks full now it's not empty anymore so at this point I just want to unload that and get rid of it because I might want to pick something else so I'm going to click on empty or unload so now let me copy over everything like

the color the stroke the size it's slightly bigger so now I'll go up to all so all of them are selected and I will just click once and you can see it's transferred everything over and it looks exactly the same okay let's go ahead and press unload and now I'll click on the Move tool so I can make my next Target selection so this is my new Target and I want to copy over just the 3d effect not the color so again style picker tool Head Up Click none choose layer effect Cuz that's a 3D

layer effect I'll select that one and I'll just click once you can see it's applied it excellent I'll unload again and I'll click on the Move tool and I'll select the last one so if you're wondering what layer effects are actually applied to each of these layers so you know what you're copying over you can go ahead and click on the layer effects these are all the layer effects that are on that just in a shadow and also you can notice that this is a different font to my target layer so I know that it's

a layer effect and it's a different font so I've chosen my new Target layer I'm going to go ahead and click on the style picker and now I'm going to go up and I'm going to click on layer effects and I'll just click on character settings so now I can go and just click oh no I want The Fill as well don't I the blue fill so I'll click on that and that should be everything so now I'll just click once on it and you can see it's completely copied it across the layer effect the

font the fill the lot one last little tip here when it's loaded you can keep applying it so I'll select my target layer again go back down to the style picker I'll leave them all checked and I'll just click once and of course it's applied it like I just showed you but now that it's loaded you could just select just one letter if you want or two even and basically it applies it like that very quick in this section we'll be covering the Styles panel and it's similar to the style picker tool in a way

that you can apply a style very quickly but this one allows you to create a style and store it so you can use it over and over again in the future so where is the Styles panel well in your studio you'll see over here there is a Styles tab you see layers is here and styles is just over here if you don't see it you can simply go up to window scroll down and you'll see Styles there tap on that and it will appear somewhere here in the studio so Affinity has included a few Styles

as default as you can see here and basically how you apply them is just you click on whatever shape you want and you just click on apply but I'm going to press command Zed cuz we're going to make our own style so over here I have what looks like a sun and I'm just going to show you what it's made of so it's just one layer it's an ellipse it basically has a Yellow outline a stroke and then we have a gray going from kind of a reddish color to an orange color and that's it

that's all that's involved with this so I can create this into a style now so let me go over to the Styles tab again first things first is we need to create a new category so I'm going to click on the right hand side and say add new category and I'm going to call this Affinity lesson okay so now I've got my shape selected this is the style I want to create I can simply right click and I can go down to the bottom here and it says create style I'm going to click on that

and you can see now I have one style selected so with this style what can I do well we can go over here to this word and I can simply go over to the Styles Tab and I can just click once there we go it's applied very easily if you want to rename this style instead of just style one you can just right click on it click on rename style and type whatever you want so I've made another one here as well it's just another Circle but it's got a 3d effect applied to it it

so if I go to the layers and go to effects this is what I've applied to it just the 3D thing and I've got a blue color Fill so from this I want to make a style as well so over to the Styles tab just so I can see it right click scroll down to the bottom create style it's been added now I can go over to this boring triangle here and just click style two and it's applied it and of course when it's applied you can actually further manipulate it by just going into the

layer effects tab and playing around with it as much as you want so that's the Styles panel in this section we're going to be covering the warp tool now as the name suggests it allows you to warp objects whether it's text whether it's a shape but they have to be Vector so just so you know I have made an in-depth tutorial on this so you can go and check that out but we're going to be covering the basics here so let's start off with a basic shape so I'm going to be applying it to this

Square here but before I do that it's going to be more evident if I have some stripes in there so I'm just going to turn on snapping so it just gets into the middle there and I'm going to clip it inside of the square shape now they all move around as one I can turn snapping off now okay so where is this warp tool well if you Go over to layers just underneath there's a little icon there this one here it says warp as you hover over it click on that once you've clicked on it

you'll see there's a few options here mesh quad perspective Etc to begin with just select quad now that I've selected that you can see in the context tool bar we have those same options again if we click up here we could cycle through them leave it on quad for now we have some snapping options which I'm going to show you we have mute mesh that's coming up as well and then we have convert curves right at the end so you can warp as much as you want here make the shape you want and then if

you're really sure you want to keep it you can convert it to Curves which means it bakes in that style but just know that if you do apply this War tool at this point and you don't click convert to Curves it is non-destructive so if you warp to a shape that you like but then later on you want to make changes to it or you want to go back to its original shape you can do that so let's get started so now that we're in the warp tool what can we notied well we have four

nodes on the outside but they're round this time they're kind Of like warp nodes I can go ahead and click on these and drag it around and you see as I've put those stripes in there it's more evident what's going on so I can play around with these Corners as much as I want and notice it still says quad but if I go ahead and let's say drag this side out so I'll click and I'll drag that out like that and I'll let go you can see that it's now turned into mesh the warp mode

is now mesh it's not quad anymore and basically you can further customize it now when I think of mesh I think of some kind of grid these nodes here we only have four of them cuz we started off with a quad but they allow us to just click on the the sides somewhere so I'll click there and you see now I have a path going along and I can play around with this handle and we can start creating our own mesh so I could just add a couple of nodes there or Junctions let me just

play around with this one up here and I'll hold the handle and it's just like when we were playing around with the shapes you get these handles and these nodes but these are called Junctions in the warp tool and you can see I can pull it out and I can do this and it kind Of happens quite smoothly I'll do it on this side as well might be a bit more evident there we go so it kind of looks like a flag now and I can hold this side and pull that out as well so

these are round right now and if we go up to Junction I've got that one selected it says it's a smooth node but I can switch it to a cusp which is basically like a sharp node so I'm going to click on that and you can see it is turned square and now when I hold this handle and move it it kind of comes to a sharp edge there whereas this one if I hold it and do this it's a lot smoother isn't it let me hold the vertical one actually there we go it's a

lot smoother the transition there so you can play around with the different Junctions let's look at snapping so if I just move these two down be a bit more obvious then okay so we'll go to snapping the first one it's just like snapping with the nodes in the pen tool or the node tool so the first one says align to nodes of selected curves if I select that one and I just click on one of these as I go down you see it will snap to these different Junctions so if you're a bit particular with

your design you can turn that on okay let me move this One up what about if I selected two of these well I can just hold and select two of these nodes here this is the one I will grab I will click on it and move up and you can see it's snapped to the node on the right but if I keep moving up will it snap to that other one that I've grabbed no it isn't so this is where the next option comes in the snap option snap all selected nodes when dragging so I'll

click on it and just show you so I'll click and drag that up yes it snapped to the first node I keep dragging up and yes it snapped to the second node so those are your snapping options and you see now we have a mesh there's these lines going left and right up and down if I no longer want to see that I can just click on mute mesh and I'll kind of see the mesh of the warping that I'm doing but I can see the original shape behind okay now let me show you how

it non-destructive so let's say I keep it like this this strange warp that I've done so I no longer want that anymore if we look in the layers panel we can see that it has created a warp group and if I click on this Arrow here you can see in there is the original layer that I had so if I click and drag that out you Can see this is the thing we started with but if I click and drag it back in you can see it takes on that shape again so that's non-destructive you

can always take it out of that warp group and it will be back to the way it was okay I'm going to click C off now and if I click back on it again how do I get back into those warp options cuz I'm not seeing them anymore well you simply head to the node tool or you press a on the keyboard and now you're back in the warp tool mode so let's convert it to Curves let's say we're really happy with it we're not going to go back let's go up and just click on

convert curves and see what happens so I've clicked it and there's this bounding box around it but if we look in the layers panel we can see group here if we just click on that inside this is the group that we want so I can drag that out and you see this group here I don't no longer need that it's just an empty group and if we look at this and if I just look what's inside of it in the child layers I can see all of those stripes are there they're all nodes and they're

all curves so that would be the destructive way of keeping your item as it is but you don't need to Do that unless you're absolutely sure okay let's move on and try it on some text so I'm going to delete that and let's move down to this warp text here so like before I've got it selected I'm going to go down to the warp tool click on it and this time I'm going to choose one of these other ones so Arc horizontal so as soon as I've clicked on that it's given us this Arc and

we look up in the options here we have a value we can click on that value and drag it in and out like this so it's a very quick way of adding an arc to some text also I can go to Arc vertical and it will show me what it would look like there and you can de cycle through seeing which one you want and when you do find the one you want you can continue to customize it further so bend horizontal there it is you've also got fisheye these are presets of things that you

could actually do yourself but just makes life slightly easier doesn't it and then we've got twist as well but for now let's keep it on Arc horizontal and leave it like that okay moving on to the last example in fact I'll get rid of that so it just gets out of the way okay Okay so we've got the Welsh flag here in Front of us basically just like my first example we had a square with some Stripes clipped inside of it and this is much the same I have a shape a rectangle shape and the

inside there is all of the design and it's all Vector I can go ahead and apply it to this so again we'll go down to warp click on that I will start off with quad cuz I'm going to make it kind of wave in the wind I guess so the first thing I'll do is I can click and drag on these two Junctions here and drag it up and then I will just click and drag this down and I'll click and drag this down as well and then this handle appears because I've just pulled those

sides out and I could just keep playing around with it like this so starting off with quad was quite a good idea obviously now it's turned into mesh again as you can see and we can make further amendments to it so I can add a couple more of these points here maybe it's really windy so this one I want to go up and whip out like that and I want to drag that out as well you can get really creative with maybe how it's blowing in the wind add a couple more in the center there

so it looks super warped and you can keep adding to This as much as you want and this is a pretty bad example actually of how a flag might wave in the wind but if you check the full tutorial you'll see I actually did it quite well so there it is there's the basics of the warp tool let's move on in this section we'll be covering the assets panel and this assets panel is extremely useful as it allows us to store design elements that we like that we might have made made and we want to

reuse over and over again so where is this assets panel well it's not anywhere here right now so let's go and find it so go up to window and click on assets and the assets panel has now appeared and as you can see it's already opened up on an assets pack that I've created previously called the tropical Creator kit so here's how it works I can just click and drag out one of the designs great if I want that same one again I can just keep dragging multiple versions out you have a category and you

have subcategories let's go and create our own one so the first thing you do is go up to this burger menu here and click on that we'll click on create category and let's name it let's just call it tutorial and I'll press okay so now we have a New category okay let's say you have designed this and you know you might be using it over and over again for thumbnails well rather than putting it on that hard drive you still can of course you can place it in the assets panel so I can go over

here and just click click and drag it and let it go now it doesn't matter what project I'm on I could just open up my assets and I can go to my tutorial category and I can just drag an asset out just like that so it works for simple designs like this and it also works for more complex ones like this so you can see in the layers panel this has lots and lots and lots of layers inside and I can still store that up there with my assets so now it's added I can click

and drag out another copy so we've made a cat and technically this one here would be a subcategory where it says assets you can go ahead and rename it if you want to create another one let's say you want to split everything so it's very organized you could just click on the burger menu again go down to create subcategory and now you've got a new category and you can go ahead and rename it if you filled your assets up and you think you know what I want to save this For future use just in case

I have to reinstall this program or whatever you can just click on this burger menu again and then you can just go down to export assets ass and that will export it as a AF assets file and then you can just install that onto Affinity designer whether it's yours or somebody else's and once you no longer need the assets panel anymore you can go ahead and close it just click on the top Burger menu there and click on close panel group and that was the assets panel in this section we're going to have a look

at the stock Tab and it's a quick and easy way to get through to a stock site and just drag off photos or vectors for your design projects so where is the stop tab well it's hidden right now so let's go find it we'll go up to window and we'll go down to stock this one here click on it and then this popup panel appears the stock panel and you see here we have pixabay or pexels you can either go on their actual website and have a look around and download or you can go through

here so pixels just has photos and pixel Bay has photos and Vector elements so let's search for a cat in this search box so I'll just type in cat and I'll take This one up here so I'll just click and drag it onto my document and I'll just resize that because that is absolutely huge so I have a picture of a cat and what if I wanted a cat Vector well I'm going to scroll down and find a simple one just a silhouette so I'm going to click and drag that onto my document now I'm

finished with the stop tab I can go up to the Burger menu and press close panel group so if you look in the layers panel we have an image you can see the little image icon next to the cat and then for this Vector item it says we have an embedded document so how do we go about editing this this well if you double click it one two it opens up into a new page in Affinity you see there's our tutorial page and there's the embedded document page so I could make a change to this

let's say I make it red and then I go back to our original one and it's still red but I like to just copy it so I'll just select it here in the embedded page I'll press command C and then I'll go back to my original document I'll delete that one and I'll press command V so now I can just just do all my edits without having to go over to the embedded page and I can simply just Delete that embedded page and go about making my changes so it's a very useful way of just

getting some stock images really and you can go ahead and maybe just place this cat head in a circle so I've just made a circle there and I'm going to go in the layers panel and drag it onto the circle and that's clipped it inside so that's the stock tab in this section we're going to be covering symbols now symbols let you create copies of an object or design that all stay linked so if you change one all the others update automatically so I've made this really boring company logo I've just knocked this up and

we're going to turn this into a symbol so how do we do that where's the symbols panel well it's hidden by default but if we just go up to window and then go down to symbols there it is just click on that so now we've got the symbols panel open and I just want to show you in the layers panel here is our logo it's just a group that contains two shapes so I can select the group there and then I can go ahead and click on create so now we have the logo in the

symbols panel and if you look in the layers panel it now has an orange strip on it that says symbol so what can we Do with this well basically now that it's a symbol we can make copies of it so I can either copy from here so I could just hold command shift drag across a little bit and now we can see we have a copy and it's also a symbol or I could just drag from the symbols panel click and drag it out let go and now we have another copy so we have three

copies now so if I just go in and I just double click so I can just get to this sun shape layer if I go ahead and change the color of it let's say I make it green all the other duplicates are linked so they all update automatically so everything is looking exactly the same okay cool but what if we just wanted to change let's say the middle one we want to change this to a different color how do we do that without affecting everything else well you just go on synchronize here and you just

take that off just toggle it off and then you can make whatever change you want to make let's say you want to make it quite yellow and then you can look in the layers panel that layer that I just changed it has this broken orange one and that means it's not synced anymore but if you did press sync again and you went to change just This shape here and you change the color of it it would update across all of the rest of the design but you just wouldn't be able to change this one and

it be synced to the others okay so that's when you take sync off let's go to the last one which is still fully synced so if I change something here you see it's still fully synced to the one on the left so let's make it completely detached we no longer want this group to be a symbol anymore we could just go ahead and click on detach so now it's completely detached you see the layer in the layers panel it no longer has that orange line on it so any changes I make to it won't affect

any of the other layers and you can't really come back from this if you want to make another duplicate just make just drag in from the symbols layer okay so that's the basics of it and how it works so let's just try it again so it beds in so if you want to delete the symbol just go in there and press delete symbol do I want to confirm to delete yes I'll I'll just delete all of these other options here and I'll just take this one down into this artboard here okay the real scenario you've

just designed the logo you want to make It into a symbol so you can place it on here so any future changes that you're asked to make will happen automatically so with it selected we'll select the group we'll create the symbol excellent then we'll just drag that over to our other artboard and line it up excellent you get a phone call hey we don't like this green we want it to be orange okay no problem I can do that so just to be sure you make a copy of this artboard so you just hold shift

command click and drag down so you've got your copy now and what you want to do now is just detach these ones just so they don't change and now you'll concentrate on making this circle here orange so you're going to go up and click on the orange one here and now you've made it orange excellent you send it off they like it excellent but then 2 weeks later they come back and say asle we like the green well you've already got it so that's fine okay let's switch to another document and we'll see what happens

in the symbols panel so I'm going to click another one that I have open here and you can see the logo is completely gone so obviously don't rely on that symbol to be there across multiple documents so here we have a Surfer so I'm going to make a symbol out of that one so I'm going to press create and that's made it into a symbol now I'm just going to drag out a few copies of him there we go and let's say I want to changed the T-shirt of course we've done color before haven't we

so I can do that because the sync is on but also I can go in and let's say h let's make the surfboard bigger maybe so I can click on the surfboard and make it bigger like that and it changes across all instances so maybe he's on a really big surfboard now and you can do that with pretty much anything there I mean I have plenty of layers you can change things like the shorts the hair even you could make slight bigger maybe he's a big hair Surfer and there we go you can see it

all let me turn off snapping there we go look he's bald and now he isn't he's got loads of hair so basically you can see what happens here actually could be quite useful for building up big crowds of people and just changing some of their t-shirt colors okay that is the symbols panel in this section we're going to be covering grids and also isometric grids and these can be useful for maintaining composition and spacing when you're Designing so how do we we see these grids well you could just simply press on command and apostrophe and

it will show one and if we just start here I'll just select a rectangle and I will click and drag out like this and notice how it's snapping I'll zoom in a little bit more notice how it's snapping as I get to the grids this is because my snapping is turned on up here and if I click on this I can go down and say snap to grid that's selected and I can snap to Baseline grid that's these other faint lines in between kind of like a sub grid so you can select whichever ones you

want here and that helps with designing so I know that this has fit perfectly in this Square here and I can see it's helping me snap into place and I can make a copy of that let's say I press command J to power duplicate and then I move it across so it snaps into the next location I can press command J again and I can see that it perfectly lines up all the way so this is the simple way of using grids and spacing out let's have a look at the other options that we have

so to do that head on up to view and then grid and axis so I'm going to click on that and you see this popup box appears and Basically at the top we've got a couple of presets one for creating icons one for isometric and then we have show grid here toggle that on and off you can see the grid appearing and disappearing then we've got pixel grid and then we have mode right now it's on automatic so it's automatically created this grid to fit our document size and you can see these gray lines the

grid if it's a bit hard for you to see you can just whack up this slider to make it easier on the eye you can also change the color as well if I go ahead and click on basic you can see we just have a basic grid and it says spacing 64 I could change this to 100 if I want and you can see they get slightly bigger I'll just leave it on 64 for now and you see divisions we just have one at the moment if I click on three and then press return you

can see we have the sub grid underneath but I'll just leave it on one for now so that's basic you can set it up the way you want it and then when I click on Advanced here's where things get quite interesting we have grid type standard so that's what it's on right now I can click through all of these and these are all kind of presets so We've got isometric diametric trimetric and 2: one triangle so there's all kinds of grids that you can get set up really quickly with and start designing but if I

just leave it on isometric for now you can go down and I'm not going to go too far into this you can customize it the way you want it on your first axis second axis Etc you can create a plane set and we'll go into that a little bit later this little popup box appears it's basically the isometric box this is what we'll be using but I'll just get rid of that for now so you can go further into that but we'll just keep it to the basics for now and then also you have Cube

that's the last one and basically this allows you to kind of manipulate this Cube so you can see how the grid reacts so you can customize it to how you like so this is kind of like left and right spinning in one place and if I go here and drag this up and down I can get kind of a different view so if you are creating an isometric kind of design this could be quite useful when you get more advanced but for now let's just go on this preset here which is isometric with planes so

I'm going to click on that and I'll just leave It on that one okay press close so ready to start designing now but first I want that isometric box again so how we get that is we go up we go to window and then we go to isometric so here it is we have it with us now so let's just go ahead and draw out a box so I'm going to click on the rectangle tool and as my snapping is turned on I'll just click about here and I'll just drag out a shape about this

big so why did it draw it with the plane well because this option was selected edit in plain let me continue with this so right now it's on top so that's why it drew it that way but if I click on side let's say front here actually it changes the grid changes so I can go ahead and draw out another one let's say I start from here and I click and drag up it's drawing it as if it's the right side of this Cube I can go ahead and make it slightly darker so it looks

like a proper Cube and then let's say I want to do the other side I can click on side and then click and drag drag out another box snap it into place and then maybe I'll make this one a little bit lighter and in fact I'll make the top one a lot lighter so there we go I can turn off this Grid At this point just command apostrophe and just see what it looks like so we've just made a cube pretty much so I'll turn it back on and I'll show you another way we can

do it so I'll just delete those layers and this time I'll turn off edit in plain so I'm going to turn that off I'm going to put it back on top and now I'm just going to draw out a square so I'll just click and drag out I'll hold shift to keep it perfectly Square shaped then from this point I can go over and I can click on fit to plane so now that I've clicked it there I can click on the Move tool and I can just line it up to the grid you see

it's not perfect because I kind of guessed but then I can just pull it out and there it is it fits in place and I can do that with the side as well so if I go ahead and draw another one out let's say like this I can go over to let's say this side I'll click on that and then I'll click on fit to plane and I click on the Move tool and I can try and line it up oh my God I got it perfectly right that's amazing I wasn't expecting that okay so

that's another way of doing it and of course there's other options in here you see it says like flip horizontal in Plain you can click on that you can click on flip vertical and you see like let me just show you this is the top of it as you can see the handle and if I click on flip vertical you can see it's gone upside down now so if I had some kind of pattern clipped in here it might be more obvious and you can rotate clockwise and anticlockwise as well but for now let's just

delete all of that and we'll just try and make some kind of building so I just want to show you something I created before in it and that is this one here so using this same grid I was able to create this big kind of skyscraper you might find in Miami just with the windows going around like that I can turn on the grid so you can see command apostrophe you can see how it kind of lines up in fact I think I might have used a slightly different grid but anyway that's one version we'll

try and create something like that and then I'll just click off of that and I'll show you when you get more advanced you can start creating things like this so this is something I made in a previous tutorial you can zoom in really far to look at all the kind of drinks but this was all done on an isometric grid As well so I'll just get rid of that for now and we'll start from the beginning just make something simple and by the way if you do want to change the Grid at any point you

don't need to go up here again you can just click on this grid settings and play around with it from there so for now we're going to hit top and we're going to hit edit in Plaine and I'm going to select the rectangle tool and I'm just going to drag out a shape that I want I'm holding down shift to keep it in a perfect square that's my first one done I'll make it light now I'll create the side so I'll just click on side and maybe I'll start from down here you see it's kind

of lining up because I've got snapping on yeah down here and I'll click and drag that up and I'll just try and snap it into place I'll make this slightly darker there and then we'll do the front side so again I'll just click and drag down until it snaps into place and I'll make this even darker okay now I want to create those windows that go around here so I can actually reuse this shape that I've got so I'm going to press on the Move tool and I'm going to press command C command V I've

made a copy I'm Going to make that lighter and now I'm just going to drag this down and snapping is going to help me place it into the right place so I'll just place it about here we'll make them a lot thicker and from here I can just press command J again and just hold shift and click and drag that up to the top there and I can press command J once more and that's done so that's one side of the windows done I can make my life easier Again by just selecting all of those

windows pressing command C command V I've got a whole load of duplicates now and I can just go up to transform and flip horizontal now I can just move it over to the side like that until it snaps into place so I'll turn off the grid so we can see what we've made so command apostrophe there we go I probably need to change the colors of some of these things but you can see we can make kind of a tall Cube building looking thing and we can start adding doors if we want as well let

me just make one now actually so I'll just turn on my grid again I'll just copy this window here I'll hold down command and click and drag drag it inwards I'll change it to I don't know let's say yellow color just so it's obvious for You and we'll make it really small actually and then I'll just drag this down into the middle somewhere maybe a little bit smaller and there we go we have a door so this is how you design with grids using the isometric grid and this isometric panel so you can get creative

and make something like Sim City okay that's grids and isometric grids in this section we'll be talking about the place tool but not a lot because it's quite simple to use really on the left hand side you'll see Place tool there basically it's a way for you to place in either PDFs jpegs pgs things like that photos so all you have to do is just click it and it opens up your desktop and you can go ahead and choose a photo so I'm going to choose one there and click open and then you can just

click and drag out your photo to whichever size you want when you let go you can see in the context tool bar if I click on this it will tell me the image DPI at that size that scale I can click on original size if I want I'm not going to cuz it's going to be too big and then you can press replace image as well so you could just click on that and maybe replace it with a different image Also it includes things like fill so you could actually just click on that and it

will just apply a kind of fill layer to it could be a nice quick way of doing it but I prefer to do my photo editing in Affinity photo but anyway this is what it does one good way of using it actually this one is let's say if I wanted to clip it inside of this circle here so I'll just place it over in the layers panel I'll just click and drag it on top and it will clip it inside maybe I want a few of these photos here so I could just make a copy

by holding down command and dragging it across and then inside there I could just click on that photo again and maybe I could just replace it with another one so it's a quick and easy way of adding photos to your document or even PDFs and things like that in this section we'll be covering pixel Persona so far I've been showing you designer Persona where we've been able to create with Vector objects Vector items and using all these tools that help us create those so if we switch over to pixel Persona this is basically a dedicated

workspace that allows you to work with raster or pixel-based Graphics alongside Your vector elements that you might have designed in designer Persona so pixel Persona is particularly useful for when maybe editing a photo or retouching it or maybe you want to paint in texture using all of these raster based tools so let's have a look around the UI and see what's different so I'll just go up to personas again and I'll just click on designer Persona so you can see the user interface as it is and if I click on pixel Persona you can see

that on the left hand side in our tools panel we have different tools and all of these will be able to help us either create or edit our raster based images let's have a brief look at the tools so of course we have our move tool and then we have all of these ones here these are all basically Al selection tools and they'll help you select parts of your image and either cut them up copy them or just paint with inside of them so we have the rectangle Marky tool we've got the elliptical one we've

got the freehand selection tool which is basically known as the lasso tool in other programs got selection brush and we have the flood select tool moving down we actually have a pixel tool here and it's A pixel brush that allows you to paint individual pixels we'll go into that later we also have of course our paintbrush tool and you see next to each of these is the shortcut so this is B and of course underneath this we have some tools that will allow us to manipulate whatever we have painted so the erase brush the flood

fill tool we've got Dodge and burn we've got the smudge tool blur and sharpen and then we've got a color pick a tool and a hand so we can move around our document but if you have a trackpad you can just go ahead and put two fingers on it and move it around like this okay let's start by using the brush tool so I'm going to head on over and click on that you can click on B the shortcut on the keyboard the next thing I'm going to want to do is choose a brush so

I'm going to head on over to the brushes Tab and select one Affinity does provide lots of different free brushes I'm going to be using one of my ones for this example so I'll select my brush and now I'll go up to the color Tab and choose my color I'll choose some kind of blue color there before I go over and paint anything I can look in the context toolbar and modify the Brush size so I'll just make that slightly bigger so from this point I can just start painting so I'm going to click and

drag down just to paint our first line and notice how this assistant has popped up here says the assistant has added a new pixel layer and you're now painting on that new layer I can press X on that and we'll just have a look at our layer so I'm going to head on over to the layers Tab and see what we've made you can see it says pixel right next to it and there's a little icon here that says it's a pixel layer so unlike using the BR in designer Persona if I just click on

V the move tool I cannot use the node tool because it's not available in here so I can't manipulate this the same way I did before Also let's zoom in here and you can see as we zoom in it's just made of pixels this is a raster based brush uh cuz we're in pixel Persona so there's many things you can do to it after you've painted but for now you can see there's a bounding box around it you can go ahead and rotate it like we did before with all the shapes in designer Persona you

can drag this out and squeeze it out you can do all those same things okay let's go back to the Brush and paint again but let's choose a different color this time so this time I'll choose some kind of orange color and I will just go ahead and paint so one of the things you'll notice unlike designer Persona is actually all the layers that I've been painting on have been exactly the same layer so each time I put the brush down on the canvas it keeps adding to that same layer as you can see here

so let me delete this layer and I'll show you how to add multiple pixel layers so I'll just go back to Blue brush and I'll just click once here okay we have one pixel layer let's say I'm painting something and maybe I want to add a new layer that's just for orange well you go down here underneath the layers panel and you see it says add pixel layer if I click on that we now have a new one it's empty I can go ahead and choose a different color so I'll choose that orange color again

and now I can just paint and now you can see there two separate layers I can hit the move tool V and I can move them around independently so you can build up layers and get Crea with that of course you can change the blend mode over here as to how that layer reacts with the bottom layer Okay starting from a fresh let's look at some of the options in the context toolbar for the brush tool so I'll leave it as default I can just paint something like this you can see we've got a new

pixel layer I'm going to go ahead and make a new pixel layer so I'll click that and now we'll go up and have a look at opacity so this is what opacity does basically it changes the transparency of your brush so you can go ahead and click and drag out and you can see it's looking lighter that's because it's like 50% transparent if I let go and I start painting again I can start building it up so it's less transparent so every time I take my finger off the trackpad and click again it's building it

up and I can just keep doing that and the lighter areas have more transparency the darker areas have less transpar Arcy so that's how opacity Works let's create a new pixel layer so I'm going to go down click on ADD pixel layer and for this one I'm just going to whack opacity back up we're going to look at flow I'm going to bring that down to I don't know like 30% and when I start painting with this one I'll just do the same movement again it starts building up so I Don't have to take my

finger off it will gradually build up to create less transparent portions of it so that's how those two work opacity and flow cuz you you probably be using that a lot because in this there's only a paintbrush tool and a pixel tool for you to actually start creating and looking at the other options as we go along we've got more basically this is how your brush is set up and you can change the size the spacing the accumulation I wouldn't play around with this if you're first getting started the next one is force pressure and

basically if we don't toggle that on and we just paint something out like that you can see it's all the same thickness if we click on it it will basically change the pressure sensitivity so I'm on a trackpad right now but if you using a graphics tablet it might be slightly easier you can lightly press as you're painting and as you apply more pressure it gets thicker and thinner and also we can use a stabilizer on this brush so you can just select that maybe choose rope mode and increase the length we can click and

drag and we can use this rope to help us achieve smoother lines also we have the Symmetry Feature here if I just check it on this line appears and it basically allows us to to kind of mirror image whilst we paint you see it's kind of copying what I'm doing both sides so if I just click and drag around it will copy what we're doing okay so you can also click on mirror so it performs slightly differently so I'll just delete that and now I'll do it again this is a kind of mirror image and

if I just delete that you can see up here it says symmetry one I can change that to like two or three or four anything we want really so I could just start painting here and you can create a Mandela like effect and of course we've got the blend modes like I showed you at the start and the next one is wet edges so let's go ahead and paint without wet edges first so I'm just going to paint a layer there and now I'm going to go over to wet edges and paint again and basically

you can see the inside it looks kind of dry and on the outside it's a more saturated blue making it kind of look wet and the last one is basically you can only paint on areas that aren't transparent so right now if we look at our pixel layer we have two paint brushes Obviously they are not transparent but everything around it is so if I select protect Alpha and let's say if I change a different color there yeah I'll choose a different color and now I'll start painting you can see I can start painting from

here when I drag it over there it only turns up on the area that isn't transparent so you can kind of paint within your paintbrush now that we have a good understanding of the paintbrush tool let's move down to to some of these other tools and these will help us either arase or smudge what we've already created here so underneath we have the arras brush shortcut for this one is e when I click on it basically there's the brush you can see it's slightly different to the one we were just using you can use any

of the brushes as an erase brush so right now it's on basic and I'm just going to switch over to it here's our basic set of brushes if I click on let's say this one round brush it's a completely hard brush and I can just click and erase it like that it's quite sharp isn't it so these are all presets so I could go down to one that's a little bit softer maybe so round soft brush and in fact I can increase The size of this by the way use the right bracket key or left

bracket key to resize on the Fly much quicker and easier so now if I just paint across you can see it's a lot softer that's because the hardness is down you can go up to the context toolbar and you can change the hardness so you decide how soft or hard you want it so I could just drag it up a little bit more and make it slightly harder and of course you can change the opacity as well so I could just bring that down a little bit and I could just slightly erase it making it

a little bit more transparent and the more I click and I'm clicking off and clicking back on the more it's kind of making our brush disappear and like I said we can use any brush on our eraser so now I have my stipple brush and you can see I can erase with this brush so it kind of makes more sense that I would erase it like this if I've made a mistake so you can use that too okay let's switch on over to our layers panel and we'll play around with the next one which is

the flood fill tool shortcut is G if you click on this you can choose a color from the color Tab and then you can just go down and just Click once and you can see it's try to fill in inside of this circular brush stroke here and if you click again it just makes it more intense now the next couple which is Dodge and burn I'm going to use them on a photo cuz I find they're better useful for that kind of scenario but we can click on smudge so obviously this one will allow us

to smudge this brush a little bit so wherever you click from and drag out it will smudge it across like that and of course in the context toolbar you can play around with all the settings and the strength how much you want it to smudge like this okay let's go down and try out the blur brush tool and in fact I'm just going to switch over to the basic brushes and I will just start painting with it so you can see it's kind of blurring it out here and again you can play around with the

settings in the context toolbar and the next option down there is the opposite basically it's a sharpen brush again I will use this on the photo and then finally you have the Color Picker tool and this is basically where you can just click it and you can choose a color let's say you have a few colors here or maybe it's On your desktop somewhere you can just sample a color so let's say I want this color here I would just click once you can see in the color tab it's switched over to this color and

then if I grab my paintbrush tool and start painting it will be that color so from this point I really want to show you how designer Persona and pix pixel Persona can work perfectly together so we're going to head on over to designer Persona again top left and I'm going to grab myself an ellipse tool and just drag out a circle now I'm going to change the color of the stroke I'm just going to get rid of it actually and I'll make it a kind of light orange like this so this is a vector Circle

okay now we can head on over to pixel Persona and now I can select my brush and I'll just choose a color so maybe like a darker orange would do something like that I'll just make my brush slightly bigger with the right bracket key there and from this point I will just start painting and you can see I can paint within the bounds of this circle which is really cool I can change the opacity slightly as well so I can build it up let's do it on that side and then I'll click again and let

go and start Clicking again and start building up that edge there can make it slightly darker again and you can see what you can do here painting inside your vector object and if you look in the layers panel you can see there's my Vector object still a vector but inside I have a raster layer which contains my brush Strokes okay so let me just show you if I delete this inside layer we're still in pixel Persona if you wanted to paint on top you simply go down to add new pixel layer and then you can

go to your paintbrush tool and you can start painting from above and we bring up the opacity again so you can start painting like this and then later if you wanted that to be inside of the circle you just click on on the Move tool and you can click and drag it down and let go and now it's a child layer inside the circle I use this feature all the time okay now we have a photo in front of us I got this from the stock tab but you can just drag one from your desktop

or wherever it is on your computer onto your Affinity designer document if you want to use one from the stock tab just go up to window and then stock and then in here you can type in whatever you want and then Just drag out a photo from there see this is the one I dragged out I'm going to close this group okay so I'm going to go ahead and select this image and from this point I want to talk about an issue that you might come into in the future and I just want you to

know why things happen the way they do so right now I've got the image selected in the layers panel this photo is called an image layer as you can see as I'm hovering over it if you go up to the context toolbar you can see that actually it's at 27% scale right now so it's not at its full original size I can click on original size and it will scale up and this is actually how big it will be compared to my document size now my document size is 1920 x 1080 pixels and if we

look up at the true image size it's 5,000 by 3,000 okay stay with me here so because it's so big I have to scale it down so it fits inside of my canvas so why am I telling you all of this well basically I want to tell you that when you scale a photo down an image layer and then you go ahead and make a destructive edit let's say I use that smudge tool again as soon as I apply the smudge tool to this photo here this image layer it will no longer Be an image

layer and it will be turned into a pixel layer and at that point it will no longer retain its 100% quality Affinity designer will recalculate how big it should be based on the size of my document so let me illustrate further if I go ahead and make a copy of this in fact I'll make it smaller first and then I'll make a copy command C command V and I'll drag it off to the side place it in this corner here so at this point let's zoom in and it's still looking good quality isn't it let

me go ahead and apply the smudge tool so if I click on the smudge brush tool and I just click on him and start dragging it around you see here the assistant says the assistant rasterized the layer you previously had selected because it was not a raster layer that's correct cuz it was an image layer so if we go ahead and look at the layers panel down here you can see this image this is the one I just used the smudge brush tool on it's now a pixel layer so what's the big deal well if

I click on the Move tool and I scale it back up maybe kind of to the original size that it was when I first showed you and I zoom in you can see it's really pixelated now it's really bad quality That's because when I applied the smudge brush tool it was this big so all that kind of data was lost and it basically just rzed it at this size it baked it in and now I can no longer have that quality again so basically what that's telling us is if you're going to make a destructive

edit and I'll show you non-destructive edits in the future as well but if you're going to go ahead and use the smudge tool directly on the photo it's better to work at a much larger scale remember you can always scale down but you can't always scale up after you make destructive edits so let me delete that layer and you see our original layer is there remember I scaled it down I haven't done anything to it so I could just scale it up and it's still amazing quality so now I will apply that same smudge brush

tool to this larger scaled image and I'll just click and drag on his face you can see it's not that pixelated at all still looks pretty good so if I scale it down now and I have a look you see it's still the same quality that it was when it was full scaled up because that kind of resolution is locked in so when you're working with images just work at the bigger size and make Your edits if you need to scale down later that's fine you can do that but I thought it's important for you

to know at this stage so I'm going to press command Zed so it goes back to its original full size it's now an image layer again okay now that confusing bit is out the way let me show you the rest of the tools so before I begin I'm going to make a duplicate of this high quality image here cuz I don't want to lose it so I'm going to press command C command V to make a duplicate and for the bottom layer I'll just call it original and I will toggle the visibility off and that's

just for safekeeping I can come back to it later if I'm going to be making destructive edits I want to know I can go back so in this one I'll just call it new and we'll start using one of the tools so I'm going to go ahead and zoom in and then we're going to select Dodge brush tool shortcut for this one is o on the keyboard I'm going to select it and just make it slightly smaller so basically this one will lighten your image so if I click and drag you'll see it's slightly lightening

it and if I take my finger off and then click and drag again you can see it continues to lighten it Every time I touch down and take my finger off it's lightening it and of course you can play around with the opacity of it so you can build up slowly so I can click down here once you see it's on 100% I can click again you see it kind of just builds up you can bring that down so maybe you want to work a little bit slower like this and you know it just a

gradual one so it's not so obvious what you're doing anyway let's move on to the next one so I'm going to press command Zed to go back a couple of steps to it back to it image layer State there we go and now I'll go to burn and this one does the complete opposite it makes areas darker so I'm going to make a really big brush here and I'll leave the opacity around here and the hardness it's really soft so now I'll just click and drag click and drag and I can gradually build up this

corner so it's much darker maybe I want everything to Center on the warrior over there so that's the burn brush tool so the next one is sharpen and we'll go in and we'll see if we can sharpen an area of it so I'm just going to click and drag click and drag and you can see it is sharpening this bit where it's starting to look A bit unreal extremely unreal so you can use this on slightly defocused photos Etc so we've used these tools here all of those were destructive because I cannot go back to

the original state right now it's a pixel layer okay let's apply some non-destructive edits to this photo now Affinity photo is the full featured photo editor so if you want more options go for that otherwise let's have a look at the adjustments so down the bottom there I can click on adjustments and you see I have a whole host of options here I will choose a simple one to begin with so brightness and contrast when I click on it look in the layers panel there is a layer underneath called brightness and contrast and we still

have an image layer I can bring up the brightness in this popup box here and the contrast as well I'll just make it super obvious and then if I no longer want this anymore I can go over here and toggle the visibility off and on and you see it hasn't rasterized this image to a pixel layer so that's a non-destructive edit I can also just delete this layer so just press delete on the keyboard and we're back to the original photo another non-destructive edit you could do is to Apply a mask so if we head

down to the bottom here you can click on mask layer and you see we now have a mask layer underneath the original photo and the colors tab has turned to basically black and white so what we're going to do is we're going to mask out the edges of this and make it quite soft so we only see the warrior and a little bit of blue sky so the first thing we'll do is get our paintbrush so I'm going to click on that I'm going to make sure my paint brush is pretty big to begin with

maybe like this big and we're going to go over so the thing you have to remember here when you're applying a mask is black conceals white reveals so if I go to Black here and I hover over and in fact make sure your opacity is set to 100 to begin with just so you can see the full effect so I'm going to make my brush bigger you can see as I start painting I'm concealing parts of the image so they're no longer visible anymore I'm not painting it white and if I go over to the

white in the color tab I can start painting it back in so I can start revealing parts of the image again so let's go ahead and mask this image I'm going to zoom out Going to have a pretty big brush here and I'm just going to start painting like this and you can get a smoother result if you turn down the opacity maybe or make the brush slightly bigger but I'm just going to do that so it's like a dreamy little bubble maybe like that oh no I messed up what am I going to do

well I can simply go over to the white and then I could just paint in a little bit where I think it should be there we go so I'm revealing it again and I need to go back on black and get rid of those edges there okay so basically this is masking and you can have a look what we've done over here in The Mask layer you can see it's quite small isn't it if you want to have a closer look just hold down option or alt on the keyboard and click on it once you

can see black is the places that we've concealed and white are the places that we've revealed and you see I missed a little bit down there so back on the brush I'll make sure I'm on black and I'll just paint that bit away and now I can go back onto the mask layer hold down option or alt on the keyboard click and there we go and remember it's a non-destructive edit so it's still an image so that's excellent Let's make another non-destructive edit this time we'll use one of these selection tools up here so I'll

click on the elliptical Marquee tool and what I want to do is just take a circle of this and I don't want anything else around it so if we look at the settings and the context toolbar we have feather I like feathered Edge on this one so I'm just going to keep it around there and then from the center that's where I'm going to be drag my Marquee so I'll just click and drag out and to stay in A Perfect Circle I'm going to hold down shift and I'm just going to drag out to about

there and I'm going to let go and that's done so I'm just going to go ahead and press mask layer okay now I want to deselect my selection CU I'm happy with that so I can either go up to select and press deselect there or I can press on the shortcut which is command D okay so that worked pretty well what else can we do can we apply an adjustment layer yes you can so let's go down to our adjustments again click on that and perhaps we will choose this time uh let's go for a

crazy one recolor so you can see that it's been added in there and we can change the Hue and the saturation To whichever one we want let's make it some kind of blue color maybe change the lightness a bit and that's good that's all done so there it is there's our adjustment layer on the top we can just drag that down onto the image so now it just affects just this image here so it's nondestructive so I can just delete those two layers there and gone okay let's use the selection tools to make another more

refine selection of just this poppy here close to the edge so of course I can head on over to the freehand selection tool click on that we have a few options under type uh this first one the freehand this is not going to going to be what we want so I can press command d uh there's polygon which is just straight lines and then there's magnetic I can click on that just to show you what that does I can click and drag and it's doing a pretty good job but I know that the edges of

this are a bit blurry so it's not going to work that well I think yeah okay so it's doing a pretty good job but it's not perfect I'll just finish it as I've started and there we go I'm going to press command D to deselect that you could also use the flood select tool where you just click once and it Will kind of automatically show a selection area you can click and drag down to change the amount that it selects but I don't want to use this one either what we're going to do is use

the selection brush tool so I'm going to click on that and we can have a look at the context toolbar and just check the width of our brush it seems about the right size I'll leave everything else as it is so let's start making our selection so I'm going to click and drag up oh the brush is a little bit too small so I'll just press the right bracket key and I'll just click and drag up even more and you can see it's doing a pretty good job of making that selection it has missed out

this little portion so I can just make the brush smaller with the left bracket key and just get it in there if you do overdo it like this maybe you can go ahead to mode and click on subtract and then you just brush that away so obviously it is a little bit soft so I can't expect it to do an amazing job but I can make these little adjustments if I want or I can go ahead and press refine so I'm going to click on that now we've got this box that's appeared everything red here

is basically going To be deleted and obviously everything that isn't is going to stay so what I will do I'll just click on overlay and I'll just go to black and white cuz I like to see the black cuz the black conceals and the white reveals doesn't it so I can have a closer look at this and maybe play around with some of these options here if I zoom in I can see it's a little bit Jagged on the side there so I could potentially like feather it a tiny bit just to smooth it off

bring down the ramp slightly or bring it up but if you bring it up you see it's getting more of the outside so I don't want that so I can just bring it in slightly like this and just see how we get on with that one you can mess around with this a lot but obviously I don't want this tutorial to go on longer than it should do so I will just press apply and now I can apply the mask so down to the mask I go and click on it now press command D to

deselect and you can see it's done a pretty good job there and of course we can add another adjustment layer if we want maybe we'll go on hsl this time and and maybe just change some of the Hues here maybe make a green one I don't know why you do That but you can see that I've made an edit to an image layer that image layer hasn't turned into a pixel layer so it's retaining its quality I can grab this adjustment layer and just place it on the image so it's all together as one also

you can cut parts of your image up with the selection tool but first of all your photo needs to be a pixel layer so what I do is press command C command V to make a duplicate I'll hide the original and with the one left over I could just right click go down to rasterize click on that and you can see in the layers panel it's now a pixel layer now I can go ahead and click on the Marquee tool let me just click on that one drag that out and from here you can either

grab the move tool maybe you want to move it over here or you could just press command C to copy it and then what you want to do is just e select everything so command D and I'll delete that now I'll press command V and then this is what we're left over with so that's a way to cut it up so the last tool I want to show you in pixel Persona is the pixel tool shortcut for this one is y on the keyboard when I go ahead and select it and look at the brush

width It says one pixel by default and if I click and draw you can't really see the benefit of it but it gets much more interesting when you have a smaller document so we're going to go ahead and change ours so I'm just going to go up to document setup and I'm going to change our Dimensions to 32 pixels by 32 pixels and I'll press on okay so before we start designing cuz we're making pixel art here now like retro pixel art I'm going to go up and click on view and we're going to have

a look at our grid so I'll click on show grid this will help us and by the way if you want to hide and show grid really quickly just hold down command and apostrophe and it hides it and press it again and it shows it so I'm going to go over and click on our pixel tool I'm going to choose a black color for now and then I'll just try and and draw a mushroom shape here so I'll just click and drag out something like this you know what if I hold down shift and click

and drag I can do just a straight line and just go up like that it's kind of okay isn't it I'll draw the base here and there we go we've got our mushroom we can color it in if we want but yeah you can create pixel art in this What would this be called 32bit I guess I'm not sure let me know in the comments section so we've got our mushroom and we're painting kind of retro art so that's pixel Persona in this section I'll be covering the basics of exporting your completed designs so let's

say you finished one and it's this design here and you want to export it so you simply head up to file and Export this popup box will appear and then you decide which file format you want to export it as now there are many here but some of the most common ones are PNG usually good for designs that might have transparent properties in it we've got jpeg as well very small all of these used on social media and then youve got file types that can include like vector items in them like PDF SVG EPS you've

even got PSD there which is a Photoshop file type but you decide the one you want you can just hit jpeg if you want and then here we have the options for jpeg it's telling us our document size the preset best quality high quality Etc and then it's asking do you want the whole document and it's only showing this option we'll come back to this but I just want to show you the first export And then this one here don't export layers hidden by export Persona so if you had layers there that are hidden it

wouldn't export them if you click that and basically every time you press something it will show you the preview of what's going to be exported and then it goes down into more advanced options and then when you're ready you can just press export and decide where you want to export it okay let me press cancel here and I'll just show you what happens if I select both of these shapes and now I go up to file and Export and I'll switch over to PNG and then we go down to area and remember I said about

whole document I'll come back to it well now that I've just selected those shapes it's giving me more options so instead of the whole document being exported I could select selection area only and it shows me just what I selected the one in the background there but what if I wanted it to be transparent in the background like all the white part well I just select selection only and you see we have this checkerboard in the background which means it's going to be transparent there maybe good for if you're going to be printing stickers and

then You can go ahead and press export so that's the basics of exporting if you were using art boards also this area would show artboard one artboard 2 Etc and if you selected anything like I have here it would also show you these other options here so when you're ready you just press export and you have your file in this section we're going to be covering export Persona and Export Persona can be really useful if you want to export to multiple different file types multiple different sizes just in a few clicks so let's create a

scenario I have two pieces of artwork here and I want to export both of them in two different file types one a JPEG and two a PNG and I want that for both of them so what we're going to do is head on over to export Persona right at the top click on that and the most important thing you want to do next is create a slice and basically slices are portions of design that you want to export so obviously I have two here that I could select so if you look down here underneath layers

you can can see there are two pieces of artwork there and underneath it says create slice so I can either select it from here and press create slice or I can go over here And create a slice so that's what I'm going to do first of all I'll just go over to slices so you can see them coming in by default your full document is shown right here and you can toggle it on and off if you toggle it on this will also export but right now in this scenario I only want to export these

two so let's begin I'll select the first one and I'll rightclick it says create slice I will click on it now you can see artwork one is in there and it says export slices one okay now I want this one I'll right click and I'll select create slice now artwork 2 is in there okay how do we tell it that we want it to export as a PNG and a JPEG well if we click on the drop- down arrow here on the first one you can see here it says jpeg well from here you can

decide what you want you can cycle through all of these and I will click on jpeg for the first one and underneath here it's saying it's 1X that means it's going to export at the size it is right now if you wanted to export it at double size as well you could click on that and then you've got a 2X but that's not the scenario right now so I'm going to click off of that okay great I want to Add a PNG now well you click on this little plus icon here once you click it

you can go ahead and choose a different file format I'll choose PNG so now under artwork 1 we have a JPEG and a PNG so I'm happy with that so you could go over to the next one and repeat that process but that seems a bit long to me so let's take a shortcut so with artwork one selected let's go up here and it says copy export setup to clipboard I'll select that and you see this little icon has appeared it says replace export so now I'm going to go down to artwork 2 this one

here and I'll open it up so you can see what's inside only a JPEG and I'll go over to replace export setup from clipboard when I press it now it says JPEG and it's got a PNG so from this point all I have to do is press export so I'll go ahead and do that now and I'll choose where I want it I'll just choose the desktop and I'll click export so if I just switch to my desktop I'll show you what it exported here we go we've got one PNG of artwork one we've got

one jpeg so we've got the two there and then we've got artwork 2 and artwork to again a JPEG and PNG so it worked that quickly so let's just open this One up so that's my JPEG and let me open up the PNG and you can see that's worked because the background is gray out because that's transparent so it works very very well export Persona also works really well when working with artboards very quickly so we have two artboards in front of us and they're both named artwork one artwork to so at this point I

could just go over to export Persona and instead of selecting them individually like this I could just click and drag Marquee tool over both of them now they're both selected I can either right click and click on create slice or I can go over to layers and down here press on create slice once I've done that I go over to my slices Tab and you can see I have two slices there and from this point I could just go through and tell it which file format I would like and then press export and the same

thing happens as the previous example I showed you and that marks the end of the tutorial if you've made it this far congratulations that was a long one if you've just skipped right to the end from the start what are you doing get back in there look at those chapters anyway if you did like this video leave a comment Below subscribe if you haven't already if you're wanting more detailed and in-depth tutorials I've already made some so you can go and check them out and also I want to say a big big thank you to

all of my subscribers for all the love you've shown me through the years you've helped to make my channel what it is today so thank you and I will see you all on future videos ciao for now